girls:
139.2k births since 1885
#287 (95th percentile)
boys:
2.6k births since 1883
#2486 (46th percentile)
overall:
141.8k births since 1883
#524 (93rd percentile)
The name Joy is the #524 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 141,798 recorded births since 1883. This represents the 93.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 93.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #287 (95.0% percentile) for all time with 139,216 births since 1885. For boys, it ranks #2,486 (45.8% percentile) for all time with 2,582 births since 1883.
Joy first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1883 (1883 for boys and 1885 for girls). Birth data for Joy is available in 140 out of the 141 years between 1883 and 2023 (139 years for girls and 128 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 Joy has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.2% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1885, the name was more popular for boys (100.0% boys from 1883 to 1884), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (98.2% girls from 1885 to 2023).
For girls, Joy reached its peak popularity in 1974, achieving the 85.8% percentile (ranked #107) with 1,760 births per million. The name was most common in 1974, with 1,760 births per million (ranked 85.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Joy ranks #411 for girls (56.7% percentile) with 386 births per million, which is 22.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Joy reached its peak popularity in 1922, achieving the 11.2% percentile (ranked #485) with 59 births per million. The name was most common in 1904, with 72 births per million (ranked 2.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Joy ranks #901 for boys (1.1% percentile) with 8 births per million, which is 11.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Joy".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Joy.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Joy", 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 Joy.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Joy. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Joy is pronounced as joy, 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 Joy? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Joy. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Joy, 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 OY1) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker