girls:
470 births since 1884
#5246 (8th percentile)
boys:
25k births since 1880
#728 (84th percentile)
overall:
25.5k births since 1880
#1592 (79th percentile)
The name Jess is the #1,592 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 25,491 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 79.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 79.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #728 (84.1% percentile) for all time with 25,021 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,246 (8.2% percentile) for all time with 470 births since 1884.
Jess has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1884 for girls).
The name Jess has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.2% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 71.4% of babies named Jess were boys.
For boys, Jess reached its peak popularity in 1915, achieving the 62.5% percentile (ranked #189) with 655 births per million. The name was most common in 1886, with 1,176 births per million (ranked 51.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1978, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Jess ranks #891 for boys (2.2% percentile) with 14 births per million, which is 1.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Jess reached its peak popularity in 1991, achieving the 1.3% percentile (ranked #839) with 8 births per million. The name was most common in 1884, with 36 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Jess ranks #942 for girls (0.5% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 15.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Jess".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Jesse. View all variations of Jesse.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Jess", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 14 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Jesse" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Jesse..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Jess. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Jess is pronounced as jehs, which has 1 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 Jess? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Jess. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Jess, 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 EH1 S) 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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