girls:
2.3k births since 1911
#3605 (37th percentile)
boys:
975.3k births since 1880
#30 (99th percentile)
overall:
977.5k births since 1880
#46 (99th percentile)
The name Jacob is the #46 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 977,550 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #30 (99.4% percentile) for all time with 975,254 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,605 (36.9% percentile) for all time with 2,296 births since 1911.
Jacob has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1911 for girls).
The name Jacob has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Jacob reached its peak popularity in 1999, achieving the 100.0% percentile (ranked #1) with 17,347 births per million. The name was most common in 1998, with 17,767 births per million (ranked 99.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2000, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Jacob ranks #35 for boys (96.3% percentile) with 3,810 births per million, which is 21.4% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Jacob reached its peak popularity in 2004, achieving the 17.7% percentile (ranked #771) with 85 births per million. The name was most common in 2004, with 85 births per million (ranked 17.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2004, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Jacob ranks #946 for girls (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 4.0% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Jacob".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Jacob.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Jacob", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Jacob.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Jacob. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Jacob is pronounced as JAY-kuhb, which has 2 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Jacob? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Jacob. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Jacob, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like JH EY1 K AH0 B) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
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