Jay is a first name typically given to boys, but in rare cases also used as a girls name.
The name Jay isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all boys names, Jay ranks 371. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn boys, approximately 5 were named Jay. In the entire USA, approximately 187,482 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Jay. That is 0.06 % of all living Americans.
The widely known name Jay has different origins. It is on the one hand a male form of Jaya, which derived from Sanskrit ‘jaya’ meaning ‘victory’. In English, it originally was a surname, derived from the jaybird. Jay is also a popular nickname for James, Jason, and other names startin with J.
Did you know... that in American slang, 'jay' is used to describe an overly talkative person, in reference to the noisy bird?
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Jay is a staple in the country: Boys have been given the name Jay for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Jay is therefore one of only 442 boys’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Jay is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed at #78 Jay easily made it into the top 100 boys' names of our SmartGenius statistics for male first names and has never been more popular than back in 1960.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Jay was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 903 babies were named Jay in the USA in 2022, ranking it at #349 on the list of the most popular boys' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2010, when it was only ranked #392 of all male names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 691 boys were named Jay.
There are only 386 different male names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Jay is one of them. However, Jay is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Utah seem to particularly fancy this name – the 3,748 men called Jay who live here are 0,275% of all male residents and push their name up to #82 in our SmartGenius statistics, easily placing it in the top 100 most common male names in Utah. If you look at all the states in the USA together, you can currently find as many as 187,482 people with the name Jay. Across all regions and age groups, this lands Jay on position 179 in our SmartGenius ranking of the top male names – of course, the current popularity as a baby name for newborns looks somewhat different, as you can see from the statistics above.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter J is the most popular first letter for boys’ names. 10.1% of all common boys’ names in the US start with this letter. The second most common first letter in boys’ names is A.
With only three letters, the name Jay is obviously very short. In fact, only 1.0% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly three letters. Just 0.2% of all first names are even shorter and only have two letters, while nearly 99% of all boys’ and girls’ names use more than three letters. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that if 10.1% of all boys’ names start with a J, this initial letter occurs nearly three times as often as all other letters on average. And, by the way, of all the boys’ names that begin with the letter J, the name James is the most common.
If your name is Jay and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Jay, you can simply say:
Joker
Apple
Yoyo
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Jay
Jay
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
J
A
Y
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
J
A
Y
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Jay sounds like this:
