I love this name; it's cute. We chose it for one of our daughters. A lot of people were naming their girls Carly or Karli, which is adorable, but I didn't want a common name for her, so we named her Kari Lea. It's a Norwegian name pronounced KAR-ee. (It rhymes with sari, starry, sorry.) Some people mispronounce it like Carry, because they are unfamiliar with it. I guess some parents also think it's a creative way to spell Cary or Keri, unaware that they are using the spelling of another name, which compounds the problem. Sometimes we use an umlaut to specify pronunciation (Käri).

Kari is also an Australian Indigenous name meaning 'smoke'. However I can not for the life of me find a site that will tell me to which Indigenous Australian language the names belongs for there are over 200 of them and there aren't dictionaries for them all.

If anyone knows that would be awesome.