girls:
480.8k births since 1880
#65 (99th percentile)
boys:
7.2k births since 1903
#1388 (70th percentile)
overall:
488.1k births since 1880
#135 (98th percentile)
The name Joan is the #135 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 488,070 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.3% of all names). For girls, it ranks #65 (98.9% percentile) for all time with 480,821 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #1,388 (69.7% percentile) for all time with 7,249 births since 1903.
Joan has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1903 for boys).
The name Joan has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.5% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 44.9% of babies named Joan were girls. Interestingly, until around 2002, the name was more popular for girls (99.3% girls from 1880 to 2001), but since then it has been more commonly used for boys (62.9% boys from 2002 to 2023).
For girls, Joan reached its peak popularity in 1931, achieving the 99.3% percentile (ranked #5) with 17,322 births per million. The name was most common in 1932, with 19,022 births per million (ranked 99.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Joan ranks #789 for girls (16.7% percentile) with 93 births per million, which is 0.5% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Joan reached its peak popularity in 2002, achieving the 26.4% percentile (ranked #599) with 107 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 109 births per million (ranked 21.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Joan is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #716 (21.4% percentile) with 109 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Joan".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Joan.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Joan", 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 Joan.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Joan. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 86.8% confident that Joan is pronounced as john, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is JOH-uhn, at 13.2% confidence, with 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 Joan? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Joan. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Joan, 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 N) 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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