English place name meaning settlement of Cara's people.
Carrington is an English place-name transferred into use as a personal name — a practice with deep roots in aristocratic English naming convention. The place Carrington, located in Cheshire, derives from Old English elements likely meaning "the farmstead or settlement of Cærra's people," a reference to an early Anglo-Saxon landowner whose identity has been lost to time. The surname Carrington was borne by English nobility, most notably the Barons Carrington, a title in the Peerage of Great Britain that dates to the 18th century.
This aristocratic association gave the name a patrician, drawing-room quality that has persisted ever since. In the 20th century, Carrington gained renewed cultural currency through several notable bearers. The British painter Dora Carrington (known simply as "Carrington") was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, whose turbulent life and singular artistic vision were dramatized in the 1995 film "Carrington."
In American popular culture, the name became widely recognizable through the fictional Carrington family in the 1980s prime-time soap opera "Dynasty" — glamorous, ruthless, and enormously wealthy — which lodged the name firmly in the cultural imagination as a signifier of ambition and elegance. Today, Carrington functions as a given name with genuine crossover appeal — it reads as strong and surname-like for a boy, sleek and distinctive for a girl. It has the polish of old money without the dustiness, a name that manages to feel both classic and contemporary at once.