Kåren
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Kåren is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Honduras it is the 10th most common given name. Recorded meaning: From Danish Karen, a vernacular form of Catherine that arose in medieval Denmark. The sense "middle-aged woman" comes from the popularity of the name among baby boomers and Gen-Xers.
- USUnited States1 in 377(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 2.7K
- HNHonduras≈1 in 8.3M
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- #744 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 514 (measured from records)
- 1 in 299 (inferred from the name graph)
882,576 people, 2020
of 15M given names
Highest-authority source
Denmark
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Karen in US United States, BR Brazil, EC Ecuador 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)
- DanishKaren(measured from records)
- African-American VernacularEnglish(measured from records)
From Danish Karen, a vernacular form of Catherine that arose in medieval Denmark. The sense "middle-aged woman" comes from the popularity of the name among baby boomers and Gen-Xers. The derogatory usage was popularized via African-American Vernacular English.
Sources 9
- A concise dictionary of first names
- DUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
Attested across 27 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kåren 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #796 | 882,576 | 1 in 377 | 881K | Karen | 514 |
| BR Brazil | #313 | 77,698 | 1 in 2.7K | 78K | Karen | 202 |
| EC Ecuador | — | 51,267 | 1 in 330 | 51K | Karen | 74 |
| DK Denmark | — | 19,604 | 1 in 299 | 20K | — | 1 |
| CR Costa Rica | — | 12,829 | 1 in 397 | 13K | — | 113 |
| IS Iceland | — | 819 | 1 in 428 | 822 | — | — |
| HN Honduras | #10 | ≈1 est. | ≈1 in 8.3M | — | Karen | 69 |
882,576 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); INEC — civil registry names; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names; Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry); Hagstofa — population register names 2023. 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Kåren 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 Swedish, definite singular of kår
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
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Kåren mean, and where does it come from?
- From Danish Karen, a vernacular form of Catherine that arose in medieval Denmark. The sense "middle-aged woman" comes from the popularity of the name among baby boomers and Gen-Xers. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names and DUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen and 7 other sources.
- Is Kåren a male or female name?
- Kåren is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Kåren have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 883 thousand people named Kåren, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled karen.
- Where is Kåren most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kåren is densest in Denmark — about 1 in 299 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kåren?
- In the United States, the national register counted 882,576 people named Kåren in 2020, about 1 in 377 residents.
- How common is Kåren compared with other names?
- In the United States, Kåren is the 796th most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kåren?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/k%C3%A5renThe 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, “Kåren” — the 796th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.