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Carl

proper nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • Scotland//kaɾ(ə)l//
  • //kɑːl//
  • //kɑɹl//

A male given name from the Germanic languages, equivalent to English Charles.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A male given name from the Germanic languages, equivalent to English Charles.

    Of course you know that Carl Duruside, or 'Doctor Carl', as he is always called by almost anybody, is my husband's brother?

    And Thomas Carlyle is nine. They call him Carl, and he has a regular mania for collecting toads and bugs and frogs and bringing them into the house.

    I'd weave through the throng — scanning for empties to return while flirting, sniffing out kids smoking grass and sharing smokes with Ivor and Carl on the door. With a name like Carl you can imagine a six-foot tall and wide bouncer, but Ivor...

    Indeed, some have seen echoes of the work of the Nazis’ “crown jurist” and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, in the Trump administration’s domestic policies, particularly his doctrine of “the exception”, which can be used to suspend certain constitutional rights.

Etymology

From Germanic, cognate with English Charles. * From German and other north European Carl and Karl. * From Latin Carolus.

noun

  1. 1

    informalA student at Carleton College, Minnesota.

    Located in rural Minnesota, Carleton is not surrounded by any cultural diversity unless you count pig farms and cow farms as separately diverse institutions. The nice thing about Carleton is that Carls are pretty much non-judgmental […]

Etymology

Shortening.

Forms

plural
Carls
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).