Jacob

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Jacob boys named Jacob

By the numbers

Total US births

990,532

Estimated living today

929,000

Median age today

25

Peak year

1998

Best rank

2nd

Rank in 2025

43rd

First recorded

1880

Girls / boys

2,305 / 988,227

How old the living Jacobs are

born that year still alive today

Of the 990,532 babies given the name since 1880, about 929,000 are alive — 94 in every hundred. Roughly 251,000 of them are children and 7,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2000 and half after.

An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.

Where the name comes from

Origin Hebrew

From Middle English Iacob, from Latin Iācōbus, from Ancient Greek Ἰάκωβος, from Biblical Hebrew יַעֲקֹב, from the third-person singular masculine imperfective form of the Semitic verb "to heel" (with various meanings), in turn from עָקֵב (“heel of the foot”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notable Jacobs

• Jacob Zuma (born 1942)4th President of South Africa
• Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848)Swedish chemist
• Jacob Grimm (1785–1863)German philologist, linguist, jurist and mythologist
• Jacob Bernoulli (1655–1705)Swiss mathematician
• Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851)German mathematician
• Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897)Swiss historian
• Max Jacob (1876–1944)French poet, painter, writer and critic
• Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–1682)Dutch painter and engraver

People named Jacob with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Where Jacob is most common

• CA111,132
• TX82,940
• NY52,896
• OH46,287
• IL43,209
• FL40,649
• MI40,473
• PA40,412
• IN26,914
• NC26,795

Relative to how many babies each state records, Jacob is most concentrated in Nevada (2.0×), Alaska (1.9×), Utah (1.6×), Arizona (1.6×).

Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.

Names of 1998

The most popular boys’ names the year Jacob peaked:

• Michael
• Jacob
• Matthew
• Joshua
• Christopher
• Nicholas

All the names of 1998

Jacob elsewhere

Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.

Jacob: births by region

Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.

By canton, Jacob is most concentrated in Geneva, where 0.03% of children were given it – 30 of them.

Jacob: rank by region

In 2025, Jacob was given 5 times or more in 2 regions of Belgium.

In 2025, Jacob was given 2 times or more in 3 regions of Poland.

In 2025, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Jacob appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (139th).

Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children, Poland below 2 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.

Jacob by city

One city over a few years, so these are much smaller numbers than the national ones above and not comparable with them.

Jacob among the living

How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.

A count of people on a register – the Netherlands on 1 January 2018, Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.

Where Jacob lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 3,271 men called Jacob were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.

Men: the provinces where it is densest

Listed in 51 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 1 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.

Related names

• Jack
• Jacqueline
• Jackson
• Jackie
• Jace
• Jacquelyn
• Jaclyn
• Jacklyn
• Jacoby
• Jacques
• Jacquelin
• Jacey

Jacob against another name

Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.

• Jacob vs Jack
• Jacob vs Jacqueline
• Jacob vs Jackson
• Jacob vs Jackie
• Jacob vs Jace
• Jacob vs Jacquelyn

Compare Jacob with a name of your own