Is Carey a male or female name?
Carey is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in England and Wales at 66% and male usage in United States at 57%. Country context changes the answer.
Result without a country hint
This is the response used when the request does not supply a country. It is a fallback, not a claim that every country has the same distribution.
- Association
- male
- Probability
- 57%
- Sample size
- 29,906
- Confidence
- high
Carey by country
Only sources that publish observation counts appear in this table. The probability is the dominant-gender share within that country source; sample sizes from different countries cover different years and should not be treated as population rankings.
| Country | Association | Probability | Sample | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States US | male | 57% | 29,606 | ssa |
| England and Wales GB | female | 66% | 146 | ons |
| Canada CA | male | 72% | 139 | statcan |
| Poland PL | unknown | 50% | 4 | pesel |
Attested in 8 countries and territories
Presence means the name appears in a source for that country. Sources without counts cannot support a popularity share.
AU · CA · CH · GB · IE · IN · PL · US
Carey over time
In the United States, 4% of the babies named Carey in the 1880s were girls, against 29.9% in the 2010s. The name has changed sides over time, so the answer depends on when a person was born.
| Decade of birth | United States: girls | Babies |
|---|---|---|
| 1880s | 4% | 150 |
| 1890s | 10% | 168 |
| 1900s | 10% | 175 |
| 1910s | 16% | 617 |
| 1920s | 14% | 824 |
| 1930s | 16% | 931 |
| 1940s | 16% | 1,854 |
| 1950s | 24% | 4,832 |
| 1960s | 38% | 5,346 |
| 1970s | 67% | 8,371 |
| 1980s | 56% | 3,629 |
| 1990s | 47% | 1,684 |
| 2000s | 41% | 597 |
| 2010s | 30% | 338 |
Births per decade from the US Social Security Administration (1880–2024) and INSEE (France, 1900–2025); decades with fewer than 100 babies are left out. See boys' names that became girls' names and French names that changed sex.
Look up Carey with a country
Send a reliable two-letter country code when you have one. Preserve probability, sample size, confidence and source with the category.
curl "https://namegender.com/api/v1/gender?name=Carey&country=US" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ng_live_xxxxxxxxxxxx"Copy failed. Select and copy the text.
Method and limits
Counted rows come from national registration sources that publish male and female totals. The attested-country list also includes sources that confirm presence but do not publish a sample size. Those two evidence types are kept separate.
Name data describes a population-level association. It does not identify an individual person's gender. Preserve unknown and low-confidence results, and do not use name inference for employment, medical, financial, insurance, legal or eligibility decisions.
Data version: 2026.10. Read the benchmark methodology and database provenance before applying a threshold.
Questions about Carey
Is Carey a male or female name?
Carey is used as both a female and male name. In counted records, it is associated with female usage in England and Wales at 66% and male usage in United States at 57%. Country context changes the answer.
Why can the result for Carey change by country?
A name can have different observed distributions in different populations. A country hint narrows the evidence used by the API instead of treating one global result as universal.
Does the name Carey identify a person's gender?
No. This page describes statistical associations in name records. It cannot identify an individual person and should not be used for consequential decisions.