girls:
179k births since 1881
#219 (96th percentile)
boys:
1.8k births since 1911
#2916 (36th percentile)
overall:
180.8k births since 1881
#426 (95th percentile)
The name Jo is the #426 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 180,821 recorded births since 1881. This represents the 94.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #219 (96.2% percentile) for all time with 178,986 births since 1881. For boys, it ranks #2,916 (36.4% percentile) for all time with 1,835 births since 1911.
Jo first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1881 (1881 for girls and 1911 for boys). Birth data for Jo is available in 142 out of the 143 years between 1881 and 2023 (142 years for girls and 105 years for boys). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Jo has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.0% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 83.6% of babies named Jo were girls.
For girls, Jo reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 92.8% percentile (ranked #53) with 4,045 births per million. The name was most common in 1954, with 4,045 births per million (ranked 92.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Jo ranks #906 for girls (4.3% percentile) with 26 births per million, which is 0.7% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Jo reached its peak popularity in 1930, achieving the 5.7% percentile (ranked #495) with 31 births per million. The name was most common in 1935, with 32 births per million (ranked 5.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2018, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Jo ranks #907 for boys (0.4% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 15.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Jo".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Joe. View all variations of Joe.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Jo", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 2 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Joe" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Joe..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Jo. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Jo is pronounced as joh, 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 Jo? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Jo. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Jo, 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 OW1) 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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