girls:
2.6k births since 1912
#3402 (40th percentile)
boys:
276.3k births since 1880
#136 (97th percentile)
overall:
278.9k births since 1880
#284 (96th percentile)
The name Joel is the #284 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 278,905 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #136 (97.1% percentile) for all time with 276,324 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,402 (40.5% percentile) for all time with 2,581 births since 1912.
Joel has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1912 for girls).
The name Joel has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.1% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Joel reached its peak popularity in 1981, achieving the 90.6% percentile (ranked #65) with 2,438 births per million. The name was most common in 1980, with 2,462 births per million (ranked 90.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2009, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Joel ranks #209 for boys (77.1% percentile) with 944 births per million, which is 38.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Joel reached its peak popularity in 1966, achieving the 13.2% percentile (ranked #643) with 59 births per million. The name was most common in 1966, with 59 births per million (ranked 13.2% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Joel ranks #944 for girls (0.3% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 7.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Joel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Joel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Joel", 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 Joel.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Joel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 31.7% confident that Joel is pronounced as JOH-ehl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is JOH-uhl, at 29.3% 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 Joel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Joel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Joel, 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 EH0 L) 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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