girls:
4.9k births since 1968
#2409 (58th percentile)
boys:
1.2M births since 1880
#23 (100th percentile)
overall:
1.2M births since 1880
#30 (100th percentile)
The name Joshua is the #30 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,243,643 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #23 (99.5% percentile) for all time with 1,238,699 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,409 (57.9% percentile) for all time with 4,944 births since 1968.
Joshua has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1968 for girls).
The name Joshua has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Joshua reached its peak popularity in 2005, achieving the 99.8% percentile (ranked #3) with 10,934 births per million. The name was most common in 1985, with 21,928 births per million (ranked 99.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1988, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Joshua ranks #58 for boys (93.7% percentile) with 2,750 births per million, which is 12.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Joshua reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 35.3% percentile (ranked #527) with 166 births per million. The name was most common in 1986, with 166 births per million (ranked 35.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2006, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Joshua ranks #947 for girls (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 1.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Joshua".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Joshua.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Joshua", 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 Joshua.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Joshua. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 67.5% confident that Joshua is pronounced as JAH-shue-uh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is JOH-shue-uh, at 15.0% confidence, with 3 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 Joshua? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Joshua. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Joshua, 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 AA1 SH UW0 AH0) 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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