Carrissa
Feminine · “dear”
Carrissa has one more r than any of the names it could have come from. The sound is soft, Latinate and entirely familiar; the spelling is a decision somebody made once, in America, and it has no ancestor. That gap between a name with roots and a spelling without them is the whole story of this page.
How old is the name Carrissa?
Carrissa first appears in US birth records in 1967 — 58 years ago. The typical Carrissa alive today was born around 1991, making them about 34 years old. About 900 people named Carrissa are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Carrissa most popular?
Carrissa peaked in 1991, reaching #2163 nationally. See the whole 1991 chart.
Where it comes from
From Latin carus, dear, supplies the apparent root to Carrissa
The story of Carrissa
There is a curious coincidence attached to this name. Carissa is also the botanical name of a group of thorn shrubs — the Natal plum and its relatives, native to Africa and southern Asia — which are planted as barrier hedges because their thorns fork in two directions and nothing gets through them. The plant produces a crimson fruit that is edible when ripe and poisonous elsewhere in the bush. Botanists have never agreed on where the plant's own name came from; the usual suggestion is a Sanskrit word for the fruit, adapted by an eighteenth-century naturalist into something that looked like Latin. Which means the shrub and the girl arrived at the same name by separate accidents, neither of them from the Latin word for dear, and both of them looking as though they must have.
Meaningscholars disagree
dear
If the name is the Latin adjective carus in a feminine ending, then it means dear or beloved, and that is the reading nearly every list gives. The difficulty is that Latin never made this exact word into a name, and the -issa ending arrived in English from a different direction entirely, on names like Melissa and Clarissa. So the meaning offered here is a reasonable back-formation rather than a documented inheritance: the parts are Latin, but the assembly is modern and American.
How the name formed
- Latin carus, dear, supplies the apparent root
- The -issa ending arrives on English names from Greek and Italian
- Botanists give the same name to a genus of African thorn shrubs
- American parents adopt the name and double the r
Related forms: Carissa · Karissa · Carina
Pronouncing Carrissa
kuh-RISS-uh
Three syllables with the stress in the middle. The doubled r changes nothing audible — English does not lengthen a consonant the way Italian does — so this spelling and the single-r one are identical in speech.
Nicknames for Carrissa
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1967
- Most girls named
- 199161 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #2163reached in 1991
- Change vs 2015
- −28.6%5 in 2018, from 7
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Carrissa in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Carissa in English — spelling variant
- Karissa in English — spelling variant
- Carina in Italian — related form
Carrissas among us
people named Carrissa are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Carrissa sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- Soft and musical, with a rhythm shared by several well-liked names of the same generation
- Nothing in it is hard to say, and no stranger will hesitate over the pronunciation
- Short forms available at both ends, with quite different characters
- The single-r spelling is much commoner, so this one will be corrected on nearly every form and email.
- It sits in a crowd of similar names — Carissa, Clarissa, Marissa, Karissa — and will be confused with all of them.
- The meaning usually given is an inference rather than a documented derivation, which matters if the meaning is why it was chosen.
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Carrissa
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Carrissas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 900 people named Carrissa are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Carrissa in 2025?
- Carrissa is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Carrissa with classmates?
- Carrissa will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More C names
The most-given names starting with C, all years combined.
Carol#2239 · Cynthia#1013 · Catherine#313 · Christine#1272 · Carolyn#1222 · Christina#770 · Charlotte#2 · Cheryl#4352
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Carrissa? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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