How popular is the baby name Joseph in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Joseph.

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Popularity of the baby name Joseph


Posts that mention the name Joseph

Popular baby names in Boston (Massachusetts), 2023

Flag of Massachusetts
Flag of Massachusetts

Last year, the City of Boston welcomed a total of 20,645 babies.

What were the most popular names among these babies? Olivia and Liam.

Here are Boston’s top 20 girl names and top 20 boy names of 2023:

Girl names

  1. Olivia
  2. Emma
  3. Sophia
  4. Charlotte
  5. Sofia
  6. Isabella
  7. Grace
  8. Chloe
  9. Amelia
  10. Maya
  11. Luna
  12. Gianna
  13. Mia
  14. Nora
  15. Ava
  16. Natalie
  17. Ella
  18. Emilia
  19. Maeve
  20. Eleanor

Boy names

  1. Liam
  2. Noah
  3. Henry
  4. Leo
  5. Theodore
  6. Jack
  7. Julian
  8. James
  9. Thomas
  10. Benjamin
  11. William
  12. Luca
  13. John
  14. Ethan
  15. Logan
  16. Aiden
  17. Charles
  18. Samuel
  19. Joseph
  20. Oliver

Thomas caught my eye — it’s a top-10 boy name in Boston, but (in 2022) it only managed to rank 22nd state-wide and 45th country-wide.

Massachusetts’ top baby names of 2023 won’t be revealed until May, when the new SSA data comes out, but the state’s #1 names in 2022 were Olivia and Noah. (Noah won by a wide margin, in fact. It was given to 142 more baby boys than second-place Liam.)

Sources: Most Popular Baby Names in Boston, SSA

Image: Adapted from Flag of Massachusetts (public domain)

Popular baby names in New York City, 2022

Flag of New York
Flag of New York

Did you know that New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States? (Next on the list is Chicago, followed by Philadelphia.)

In 2022, the Big Apple welcomed 99,459 babies — 48,864 girls and 50,595 boys.

What were the most popular names among these babies? Emma and Liam, yet again. (Emma has been the #1 girl name since 2017; Liam has been the #1 boy name since 2016.)

Here are New York City’s top 10 girl names and top 10 boy names of 2022:

Girl Names

  1. Emma
  2. Mia
  3. Olivia
  4. Sophia
  5. Leah (ranked 52nd for girls nationally in 2022)
  6. Ava
  7. Esther (139th)
  8. Isabella
  9. Luna
  10. Amelia

Boy Names

  1. Liam
  2. Noah
  3. Ethan (ranked 21st for boys nationally in 2022)
  4. Lucas
  5. David (31st)
  6. Jacob (32nd)
  7. Aiden (29th)
  8. Joseph (30th)
  9. Daniel (14th)
  10. Alexander (17th)

In the girls’ top 10, Esther replaced Sofia. (That said, “it’s worth noting that if Sofia and Sophia were counted as a single name, it would be number one.”)

In the boys’ top 10, Alexander replaced Benjamin.

Finally, here’s a link to New York City’s 2021 rankings, if you’d like to check them out.

Sources: Health Department Announces Top Baby Names in New York City, List of United States cities by population density – Wikipedia

Image: Adapted from Flag of New York (public domain)

Baby born in Providence, named Providence

"The Banishment of Roger Williams" by Peter F. Rothermel
Roger Williams

English clergyman Roger Williams and his wife, Mary, migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.

Williams was pious and good-natured, but also outspoken about his unorthodox views. He believed, for instance, that church and state should be separate, and that Native Americans should be compensated for their land. These and other “dangerous opinions” led to Williams being banished from the colony in October of 1635.

To evade punishment (i.e., being sent back to England and imprisoned), Williams fled the colony — alone, on foot, during a blizzard in January of 1636. It was a particularly harsh winter, but he was able to survive with the help of the Native Americans.

That spring, after making his way southward, Williams acquired land from the Narragansett and established his own settlement. He wrote:

…having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the sachems and natives round about us, and having, in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress, called the place PROVIDENCE, I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience;

In September of 1638, he and his wife welcomed their third child (and first boy). They named him Providence, after his birthplace.

Williams went on to establish the colony of Rhode Island in the mid-1640s. By then, all six of his children (Mary, Freeborn, Providence, Mercy, Daniel, and Joseph) had been born.

P.S. Virginia and Bermuda are two other New World babies named after their birthplaces.

Sources:

Image: The Banishment of Roger Williams (c. 1850) by Peter F. Rothermel

Babies named for Horatio Alger

American author Horatio Alger (1832-1899)
Horatio Alger

During the last three decades of the 19th century, American author Horatio Alger (1832-1899) wrote dozens of young adult novels. All of them were about boys who overcame poverty — through honesty, hard work, “cheerful perseverance,” and a bit of luck — to attain wealth and respectability.

Alger’s most successful rags-to-riches tale was Ragged Dick (1868), about a quick-witted bootblack named Dick (who began to go by “Richard” after his position in society had improved).

His subsequent novels featured similar plots and protagonists. They had titles like Mark, the Match Boy (1869); Ben, The Luggage Boy (1870); and Dan, the Newsboy (1893). These stories “influenced several generations of young readers, future achievers, and memoir-writers, from Andrew Carnegie to Malcolm X.”

No doubt many baby boys in the U.S. were named after Alger’s various main characters, but I’ve also found a handful named after Alger himself. Some examples…

Several others were born conspicuously early:

The first one — just seven years younger than Alger, and born in the same town — must have been named in honor the author’s father, Unitarian minister Horatio Alger, Sr.

The next three may not have been named until they were several years old (à la Emancipation Proclamation). Or perhaps they were named as babies, but their parents were inspired by Alger’s earlier work. His poem “Gone to the War” appeared on the front page of a Minnesota newspaper in 1861, for instance, and his short story “Edward’s Temptation” ran in its entirety on the front page of an Ohio paper in 1864.

Interestingly, Charles Alger Hiss, whose father was “a great admirer of Horatio Alger,” was, in turn, the father of Alger Hiss — the U.S. State Department official accused of being a Soviet spy in the late 1940s. The Hiss case helped advance the careers of noted anti-communists Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy.

Sources:

Image: Horatio Alger Jr.