Caramel or carmel?
caramel is a noun meaning “A smooth, chewy, sticky confection made by heating sugar and other ingredients…”; carmel is a noun meaning “Alternative form of caramel”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) caramel is about 1.8 times as common as carmel.
What is the difference between caramel and carmel?
| caramel | carmel | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | noun, adjective, verb | noun |
| Meaning | A smooth, chewy, sticky confection made by heating sugar and other ingredients until the sugars polymerize and become sticky A (sometimes hardened) piece of this confection Of a yellow-brown color | |
| Example | none recorded | none recorded |
| Forms | caramels | carmels |
| Pronunciation | /ˈkæ.ɹəˌmɛl/ /ˈkæ.ɹə.məl/ /ˈkæɹ.ə.mɛl/ | /ˈkɑɹ.ml̩/ |
| In writing | 3.0 times per million words | 1.7 times per million words |
Sources: caramel and carmel in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of caramel and carmel
caramel
- 1
A smooth, chewy, sticky confection made by heating sugar and other ingredients until the sugars polymerize and become sticky
- 2
Of a yellow-brown color
- 3
datedTo caramelize
- 4
A (sometimes hardened) piece of this confection
- 5
A yellow-brown color, like that of caramel
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, caramel or carmel?
caramel appears 3.0 times per million words; carmel 1.7 times per million words.
caramel 3.0 times per million wordscarmel 1.7 times per million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search caramel vs carmel?
“caramel vs carmel” is searched about 9,900 times a month on Google and 120 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“carmel vs caramel”, “caramel or carmel”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.