Jean is a female first name, but it has increasingly been given to boys for a number of years.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Jean is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 5 out of 100,000 girls have been named Jean. In the SmartGenius ranking, Jean is #2,205 on the list of most common girls names. In total, there are currently 460,953 people – children, adults and seniors – named Jean living in the United States, which is approximately 0.14 % of the entire population.
The name Jean has two different origins: it is a French masculine name, the English equivalent is John. Jean is also an English feminine name: It is a medieval variant of Jehanne. Both names go back to the Hebrew name Yochanan meaning ‘Yahweh is gracious’.
In the US,... Jean was a very popular girls name in the first half of the 20th century, while for boys, it has always been used more rarely.
Appearing throughout the time in the United States, the name Jean is a staple in the country: Girls have been given the name Jean for more than 140 years, according to official U.S. naming statistics. Jean is therefore one of only 432 girls’ names that have been given every year since 1880. Even beyond that, Jean is a very special name that peaked in popularity some time ago in the 20th century. Placed 11 Jean easily made it into the Top 100 of our SmartGenius stats for female first names and has never been more popular than back in 1928.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Jean was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
As many as 208 babies were named Jean in the USA in 2022, ranking it #1,050 on the list of the most popular girls' names for that year. However, it experienced its lowest point of popularity in 2021, when it was only ranked at #1,115 of all female names in our SmartGenius statistics – back then only 189 girls were named Jean.
There are only 537 different women’s names registered in every single state in the U.S., and Jean is one of them. However, Jean is not equally widespread in all states, but people in Wisconsin seem to particularly fancy this name – the 19,013 women called Jean who live here are 0,625% of all female residents and push their name up to #21, easily placing it in the top 100 most common female names in Wisconsin.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter J is a particularly popular initial letter for girls' names. That’s because 6.8% of all common girls’ names in the US begin with this letter. By the way, the most common first letters for girls’ names are A, S and M.
With four letters, the name Jean is shorter than most other given names. In fact, only 5.5% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly four letters. Just 1.2% of all first names are even shorter, while 93% consist of more than four 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.
This means that with 6.8% of all girls' names that begin with the letter J, this first letter is much more common than the other letters on average. And Jennifer is the girls' name starting with J, which is the most common of all.
If your name is Jean 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 Jean, you can simply say:
Joker
Elephant
Apple
Nut
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Jean
Jean
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
J
E
A
N
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
E
A
N
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. Jean sounds like this:
