Cárter

surname · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Cárter is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Gabon it is the 18th most common surname. Recorded meaning: From Middle English carter, cartere, cartare, equivalent to cart + -er.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 882(measured from records)
  • ESSpain1 in 82K
  • BRBrazil1 in 728K

carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

376,966 people, 2010

Sources
251 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 882 (inferred from the name graph)

United States

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Carter in US United States, BR Brazil, ES Spain and 1 more.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Derivation of Cárter: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Cárter
  1. Middle Englishcarter(measured from records)
  2. Anglo-Normancaretercompare French charretier(measured from records)

From Middle English carter, cartere, cartare, equivalent to cart + -er. Merged with Middle English careter, caretier (“coachman, charioteer”, a surname), from Anglo-Norman careter (compare French charretier).

Sources 5

  • 25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Wiktionary
  • 2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages)
  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 22 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Cárter counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Cárter is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—376,9661 in 882377KCarter251
GY Guyana—6441 in 1.2K644——
ES Spain—6081 in 82K608Carter42
BR Brazil—2911 in 728K291Carter69
SE Sweden—2531 in 40K253—10
NO Norway—2001 in 27K200—8
FI Finland—1361 in 41K136—3
GA Gabon#18———Carter26

376,966 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Cárter is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname88 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada

    Languages: English, German, Arabic

    Also written Carter, Karter, Cartar, Càrter, Cartér

2 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Cárter is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Portuguese, crankcase; sump (metallic cover around an automobile’s crankshaft)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Cárter under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Cárter mean, and where does it come from?
From Middle English carter, cartere, cartare, equivalent to cart + -er. Recorded by 25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado and The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 3 other sources.
In which country does Cárter have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 377 thousand people named Cárter, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled carter.
Where is Cárter most common?
Cárter is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 882 people carrying it.
How common is the name Cárter?
In the United States, the national register counted 376,966 people named Cárter in 2010, about 1 in 882 residents.
How common is Cárter compared with other names?
In Gabon, Cárter is the 18th most common surname of 6,042 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Cárter?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/c%C3%A1rter

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Cárter” — the 18th most common surname in Gabon. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Cárter parses inside a full name →