Jobe vs Joby

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Jobe Joby

Each line is every baby given the name that year, girls and boys added together — the only count that means the same thing for both names. A line breaks where the name fell below five babies in a year — the point at which the SSA stops publishing it — rather than being drawn through a figure nobody published. A single published year in a gap shows as a dot.

Who was ahead

Of the 103 years in which either name was published, Jobe for 58 years and Joby for 45 years. The lead changed hands 10 times.

• 1882–1943 Jobe ahead
• 1947–1949 Joby ahead
• 1950–1952 Jobe ahead
• 1953–1987 Joby ahead
• 1988 Jobe ahead
• 1989–1992 Joby ahead
• 1993 Jobe ahead
• 1994–1996 Joby ahead
• 1997–2021 Jobe ahead
• 2022 Joby ahead
• 2023–2025 Jobe ahead

Side by side

A rank is a position within one sex’s list for one year, so the two rank rows are not subtracted from one another and the winning column is not marked on them. The living figure is a life-table estimate, not a count.

Which name is older

Half of the Jobys alive today are over 42; half the Jobes are over 23. That is 19 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Every spelling a country files separately is added together, over whatever years that country publishes — which is not the same range in any two of them, so read the columns against each other and not the rows.

Compare something else

Related comparisons

• Jobe vs Job
• Jobe vs Jobie
• Joby vs Job
• Joby vs Jobie