Kathryn
Masculine · “unknown”
Kathryn is given to girls far more often — 455,423 girls against 1,092 boys since 1880. See Kathryn as a girl name
Kathryn is the American compression of Katherine, and the letter it kept is more interesting than the ones it lost. The th in the middle of this name was put there in the Middle Ages by people who had decided, wrongly, that the name came from a Greek word for pure. The h is a piece of medieval wishful thinking that every spelling in the family has carried ever since.
How old is the name Kathryn?
Kathryn first appears in US birth records in 1898 — 127 years ago. The typical Kathryn alive today was born around 1966, making them about 59 years old. About 800 people named Kathryn are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Kathryn most popular?
Kathryn peaked in 1898, reaching #885 nationally. See the whole 1898 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From a Greek name of unrecovered meaning to Kathryn
The story of Kathryn
Kathryn Bigelow spent twenty years making films about men doing dangerous work — surfers robbing banks, a bomb disposal team in Iraq — before becoming the first woman to win the Academy Award for directing, in a year when the film she beat was made by her former husband. She had trained as a painter and come to film through the art world, and she has been consistently uninterested in being described as a woman director, which is a position she has had to restate in nearly every interview she has given since. The award had existed for more than eighty years before it went to a woman.
Meaningscholars disagree
unknown, though long read as pure
The oldest form of the name is Greek and its meaning has never been recovered — it may not be Greek at all, and the earliest spellings do not contain a th. What happened is that medieval scholars connected it to katharos, the Greek word for clean or pure, and rewrote the spelling to match the etymology they preferred. The letter stayed and the etymology did not survive scrutiny. Kathryn preserves that mistake faithfully while dropping the ending that would show where the name actually came from.
How the name formed
- a Greek name of unrecovered meaning
- medieval scholars insert a th to match a preferred etymology
- Katherine, Catherine and Katharine in English use
- Kathryn appears as an American contraction
- an American peak at the middle of the century
Related forms: Catherine · Yekaterina · Caitriona · Katherine
Pronouncing Kathryn
KATH-rin
Two syllables in American speech, where Katherine usually has three. That compression is what the spelling records: the ending was already being swallowed, and Kathryn simply wrote down what people were saying.
Nicknames for Kathryn
High
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
- 1898
- Most boys named
- 198938 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #885reached in 1898
- Change vs 2006
- +20.0%6 in 2009, from 5
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.
Kathryn in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Catherine in French — same name
- Yekaterina in Russian — same name
- Caitriona in Irish — same name
- Katherine in English — spelling variant
Kathryns among us
people named Kathryn 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
Kathryn 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
- It offers the largest set of usable short forms of almost any English name — Kate, Kathy, Kit, Katie.
- It has been in continuous use for eight hundred years without ever becoming a costume.
- The spelling is distinctly American and distinctly twentieth-century while the name itself is neither.
- There are at least six accepted spellings of this name and she will spell hers out every time.
- The compressed form is closely associated with the middle of the last century in a way the fuller spellings are not.
- The meaning everybody will tell her — pure — is an old mistake rather than a fact.
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Kathryn
Masculine
Frequently asked
- How many Kathryns are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 800 people named Kathryn are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Kathryn in 2025?
- Kathryn is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 boy names.
- Will my child share the name Kathryn with classmates?
- Kathryn will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More K names
The most-given names starting with K, all years combined.
Kenneth#294 · Kevin#221 · Kyle#508 · Keith#800 · Karl#1585 · Kaleb#295 · Kurt#2258 · Kelly#1867
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Kathryn? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Kathryn and another name?
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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