Johan

Popularity, 1880–2025

girls named Johan boys named Johan

By the numbers

Total US births

14,788

Estimated living today

14,000

Median age today

13

Peak year

2016

Best rank

463rd

Rank in 2025

572nd

First recorded

1910

Girls / boys

135 / 14,653

How old the living Johans are

born that year still alive today

Of the 14,788 babies given the name since 1910, about 14,000 are alive — 97 in every hundred. Roughly 9,500 of them are children and 80 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2012 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

An archaic variant of Joan, from Old French Johan, from Latin Johanna. Cf. John.

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

Notable Johans

• Johan Cruyff (1947–2016)Dutch footballer and manager
• Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877)Finland’s national poet, author of Finland’s national anthem, Swedish-speaking writer and poet
• Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)Dutch cultural historian
• Johan Gadolin (1760–1852)Finnish chemist, physicist and mineralogist
• Johan Neeskens (1951–2024)Dutch football manager and player
• Johan Christian Fabricius (1745–1808)Danish zoologist
• Johan Galtung (1930–2024)Norwegian sociologist and peace scholar
• Johan Djourou (born 1987)Swiss association football player

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

Where Johan is most common

• CA2,742
• TX1,924
• NY1,504
• FL1,001
• NJ650
• IL617
• NC454
• GA436
• VA306
• AZ305

Relative to how many babies each state records, Johan is most concentrated in Nevada (3.1×), Florida (2.3×), California (2.1×), Texas (2.0×).

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

Names of 2016

The most popular boys’ names the year Johan peaked:

• Noah
• Liam
• William
• Mason
• James
• Benjamin

All the names of 2016

Johan 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.

Johan: 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, Johan is most concentrated in Neuchâtel, where 0.08% of children were given it – 27 of them.

Johan: rank by region

In 2024, Johan was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.

In 2020, with the country taken in 11 areas rather than 3, Johan appears in the lists for Province of Liège (146th).

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.

Johan by city

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

Johan 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 Johan lives in Spain

Not a count of births but of people: 699 men called Johan 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 27 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 25 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

• John
• Johnny
• Johnnie
• Johnathan
• Johanna
• Johnie
• Johnathon
• Johnna
• Johnson
• Johana
• Johnpaul
• Johann

Johan against another name

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

• Johan vs John
• Johan vs Johnny
• Johan vs Johnnie
• Johan vs Johnathan
• Johan vs Johanna
• Johan vs Johnie

Compare Johan with a name of your own