Joseph

108,935 people in America carry this name — ranked #283 of 777.

A surname carried in front of the comma as often as behind it.

Say it JOH suhf

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

JH OW1 S AH0 F — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 108,935 2020 Census
  • Rank #283 Common
  • Per 100,000 36.4 about 1 in 3,043 people

Where Joseph comes from and what it means

Hebrew in origin, reading literally as “addition”.

Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.

A name and a surname

Joseph is carried in front of the comma and behind it — thousands of Americans have it as a surname too.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 24.3%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 55.5%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 3.7%
  • Two or more races — 3.5%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 12.1%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.8%

Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.

Spellings of Joseph

Joseph is how 90% of them spell it — 121,568 people answer to the sound.

  • Joseph 90%
  • Jose 10%

Each spelling is its own census entry — the counts never overlap, so the shares are of the group, not of the country.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Surnames with the same rhythm as Joseph

Nothing else in the file ends on the same sound — a rare thing, and useful if you want a first name nobody will echo.

Same rhythm — 2 syllables, stress on the first

Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.

Try it Adult Height

Open Adult Height on its own page

Where this page gets its numbers

  • Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
  • Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
  • Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.

Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers
Other names of Hebrew origin