Jo

given name · English · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Jo is a given name, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom. In Singapore it is the 71st most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: ‘castle’. The same character is also pronounced Shiro.

rarermore common
  • NZNew Zealand1 in 1.2K◐
  • SGSingapore1 in 1.3K
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 1.5K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈61K ●

across 8 countries

#964 ●

of 16M given names

Sources
494 ●

2.5M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 2.4K ◐

Norway

Meaning & origin●

‘castle’. The same character is also pronounced Shiro. A noble family in Echigo (now Niigata prefecture) named Jo was descended from the Taira clan. Another name pronounced similarly, written with the character meaning ‘emotion’, is found in Okinawa.

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Attested across 11 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Jo is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
GB United Kingdom#237141,188136K rec.—4Jo249
AU Australia#27576,89976K rec.—3Jo220
US United States#22554,8542M rec.1 in 6.1K55KJo494
CA Canada#31141,50343K rec.—1Jo161
PH Philippines#62135,54122K rec.——Jo122
IT Italy#45414,53915K rec.——Jo68
AR Argentina—8,3005.7K rec.—27Jo57
ES Spain—8,1108.5K rec.—193Jo86
SG Singapore#718,0028.4K rec.——Jo87
NZ New Zealand#967,2096.7K rec.—10Jo119
MY Malaysia#7107,1697.9K rec.——Jo93
MX Mexico—6,0848.6K rec.——Jo84

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • English2.5M74%
  • 250K7%
  • Spanish151K5%
  • Portuguese72K2%
  • French71K2%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English2,465,98374%
249,6177%
Spanish151,1435%
Portuguese71,6822%
French71,0712%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Jo is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate given name276K records spelled Jo7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy

    Also written J-O, Jö, Jō, Jò, Jó

  • French given name86K records spelled Jo14 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Belgium, United Kingdom

    Also written Jo', Jô, J-O, Jö, Jõ

  • Korean surname64K records spelled Jo176 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in South Korea, United States, Australia, Canada

    Languages: Korean, English, German

    Also written 최, 조, Choe, Cho, Choi

  • English given name53K records spelled Jo140 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia

    Languages: English, Spanish, German

    Also written Joe, Joé, Joee, Jö, Joë

  • Polish given name16K records spelled Jo154 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Poland, Czechia, United Kingdom

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech

    Also written Je, Yeo, Ио, Жо, Йо

  • Indonesian given name14K records spelled Jo11 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia, United States, Philippines, Malaysia

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written Jö, Jô, Jõ, Jó, Ĵö

83 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Jo is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, Darling, sweetheart.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, Hebrew; God shall add; nickname

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • nickname from jo ‘good’.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • variant of Cho.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In sit-pro, blame, suspect

    as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time●

02.5K5K7.5K10K1900195020008.1K · 1954

Show as table
Jo in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1881–2025
Yearrecords
18815
18839
18847
188511
188614
18875
18887
188911
18907
189115
189213
18939
189415
189511
189620
189716
189817
189917
190024
190119
190225
190329
190426
190534
190634
190733
190846
190941
191040
191141
191268
191389
1914103
1915128
1916152
1917145
1918199
1919227
1920231
1921259
1922302
1923385
1924534
1925635
1926815
1927974
19281,168
19291,593
19301,871
19312,086
19322,388
19332,541
19343,257
19353,296
19363,292
19373,226
19383,172
19393,524
19403,427
19413,757
19424,175
19434,300
19444,226
19454,224
19465,828
19476,724
19485,986
19495,802
19505,676
19516,001
19527,092
19537,513
19548,052
19557,656
19566,953
19575,718
19585,226
19594,052
19603,371
19612,795
19622,449
19632,190
19642,052
19651,852
19661,590
19671,409
19681,325
19691,164
19701,103
1971910
1972722
1973665
1974587
1975520
1976417
1977365
1978323
1979306
1980349
1981340
1982267
1983207
1984210
1985171
1986109
1987132
1988111
198989
199085
199173
199270
199360
199464
199558
199644
199758
199852
199945
200024
200128
200229
200329
200418
200517
200625
200718
200817
200918
20107
201114
201218
201315
201418
201527
201634
201740
201840
201934
202035
202142
202236
202347
202434
202536

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 144 years between 1881–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

19001920194019601980Jo Van Fleet, b. 1915Mary Jo Catlett, b. 1938Raquel Welch, b. 1940Adrienne Barbeau, b. 1945Debra Jo Rupp, b. 1951Belinda Carlisle, b. 1958Wendie Jo Sperber, b. 1958Jo Nesbø, b. 1960Amy Jo Johnson, b. 1970Jeanette J. Epps, b. 1970

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence●

Attested in 72 sources across 38 countries.

Official registers attesting Jo
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202055K#818
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—6.4K#556
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020204.5K#7,128
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020103.6K#9,108
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)20223.6K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—3.4K#4,276
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—3.1K#3,452
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20203K#818
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020002.5K#11,476
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)20252.3K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—527#3,452
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—322#3,744

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 741 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Jo?
We estimate roughly 61 thousand people bear Jo (counting its spellings and scripts) across 8 countries in our records.
In which country does Jo have the most bearers?
Jo is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom, where it is most often spelled jo.
How common is Jo compared with other names?
In the United Kingdom, Jo is the 237th most common given name of 369,273 given names recorded there.
Is Jo a male or female name?
Jo is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Jo mean?
Recorded meaning: ‘castle’. The same character is also pronounced Shiro.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/jo

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Jo” — the 237th most common given name in United Kingdom. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Jo parses inside a full name →