Kary
3,378 recorded births · active 1917–2023
Compare Kary →Living-age distribution
The median living Kary is 53. If you meet a Kary, there's about a 70% chance they're between 34 and 67 years old.
Popularity arc
Peak Kary: 1971. Down 93% from peak.
Projected: the dashed 10-year forecast (Holt damped-trend exponential smoothing, fit to recent years), with a shaded 95% interval.
Gender balance
37.7% male, 62.3% female.
Among males: median age 58 (41–69). Among females: median age 50 (29–64).
Rarity
Kary ranks #5,452 out of 105,966 names ever recorded by the SSA.
Geographic fingerprint
Karys are 0.3x more common in the West than the national average.
Predictive modeling
Three statistical models, all fit to Kary's own SSA history plus the historical behavior of every other name in the dataset.
Peak popularity prediction
Kary's modeled peak was #1,768 in 1967 — its trend isn't projected to beat that.
Projects the trend forward, then converts share into rank using this year's popularity distribution.
This forecasts Kary's share of births by fitting a damped-trend model to its last 95 years of data and projecting 10 years forward with a widening uncertainty band. Each projected share is then translated into a rank by comparing it against 2025's actual name-popularity distribution — so the model implicitly assumes the overall shape of that distribution doesn't shift much over the forecast window. Its trend is projected to stay below its historic best over the next 10 years, so the model treats 1967 as its peak. Milestone probabilities come from how much of each year's uncertainty band clears that milestone's rank, combined across years as if they were independent — which slightly overstates the odds for names sitting right at a threshold, since a good year is usually followed by another good year rather than an independent coin flip.Name life-cycle stage
A rule-based classifier over recent growth, momentum, and peak proximity.
Kary peaked in 1971 and now sits at roughly 7% of that peak, 54 years later — a name that was genuinely common once, now mostly heard from an older generation.
Popularity survival model
Once a name reaches a rank tier, how long does it typically stay there before falling out?
Built from a Kaplan-Meier survival curve: every historical run any name has ever had above this tier, with runs still ongoing today counted as still in progress rather than as an exit.Kary isn't currently in the Top 100 tier. Estimated chance of entering it in the forecast window: 0%.
If Kary enters Top 100, chance it's still there after:
Names that do enter Top 100 have historically stayed a median of ~19 years. Based on 668 historical Top 100 runs across every name in the dataset.