Jay
About 198,132 American babies have been named Jay since 1880, most of them around 1960. In 2025 it ranked 392nd. About 140,000 Jays are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 56.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Jay boys named Jay
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 198,132
- Estimated living today
- 140,000
- Median age today
- 56
- Peak year
- 1960
- Best rank
- 78th
- Rank in 2025
- 392nd
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 2,584 / 195,548
How old the living Jays are
born that year still alive today
Of the 198,132 babies given the name since 1880, about 140,000 are alive — 71 in every hundred. Roughly 14,000 of them are children and 40,000 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1969 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 a surname
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Jays
- Jay Leno (born 1950)American television host and comedian
- Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)American biologist and historian of science
- Jay Bothroyd (born 1982)English association football player
- Jay Chou (born 1979)Taiwanese pop singer, songwriter, and actor
- Jay Baruchel (born 1982)Canadian actor
- Jay Mohr (born 1970)American actor and comedian
- Jay Rodriguez (born 1989)English association football player
- Jay Sean (born 1981)British singer, rapper and songwriter
People named Jay with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Jay is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Jay is most concentrated in Utah (2.4×), Idaho (2.3×), North Dakota (2.1×), Montana (2.0×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1960
The most popular boys’ names the year Jay peaked:
Jay elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Jay | 14,694 | 59th |
| Scotland boys | Jay | 3,398 | 33rd |
| Northern Ireland boys | Jay | 1,099 | 34th |
| Ireland boys | Jay | 789 | 134th |
| France boys | Jay | 395 | 1,479th |
| Belgium boys | Jay | 327 | 476th |
| Switzerland boys | Jay | 281 | 425th |
| England and Wales girls | Jay | 222 | 701st |
| Scotland girls | Jay | 184 | 288th |
| France girls | Jay | 30 | 5,960th |
| Poland boys | Jay | 5 birth registrations | 595th |
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.
Jay: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Jay | 242 | 0.019% | 310th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Jay | 33 | 0.008% | 406th |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Jay | 5 | 0.008% | 184th |
| Romansh boys | Switzerland | Jay | 1 | 0.027% | 6th |
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, Jay is most concentrated in Aargau, where 0.02% of children were given it – 29 of them.
Jay: rank by region
In 2025, Jay was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Jay | 714 | 7 |
In 2021, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Jay appears in the lists for Province of Antwerp (352nd).
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 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.
Jay 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.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| the Netherlands boys | Jay | 2,798 | 4,664 |
| the Netherlands girls | Jay | 73 | 181 |
| Finland boys | Jay | 45 | 105 |
| Finland girls | Jay | 19 | 25 |
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.
Related names
Jay against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.