Karel
Rare enough that most Poles have never met one: barely over a hundred are alive, nearly all of them men. The name is Germanic, from a word for "free man".
Karel Pronunciation
Karel is pronounced KAH-rel (/ˈkarɛl/).
What Karel means
Where Karel comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Karel comes from a Germanic root, from the Old High German karl, a word for a grown man, a husband, a free man. The short meaning that follows the name is exactly that: free man, or in Polish wolny człowiek. The same root gave Europe the name Charles, and it traveled through many tongues before settling into this short, blunt form.
The Czech writer Karel Čapek carried it into the twentieth century. His 1920 play R.U.R. gave the world the word robot, though his brother Josef proposed the term. The name sits next to one of the most borrowed words on Earth.
On a Polish class register, Karel reads as a visitor from across the southern border, close to the home-grown Karol yet spelled its own way. The letters spell the meaning without decoration. Free man.
How many people are named Karel
1 in 179380 men in Poland is named Karel. 122 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3043 among male names.
Karel as a middle name
Karel is a first name for 122 men in Poland and a middle name for another 27, an 82/18 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 1631st, between Kaleb (27) and Karsten (27).
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#1629 Jean-Claude27
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#1630 Kaleb27
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#1631 Karel27
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#1632 Karsten27
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#1633 Kasjusz27