Josu

given name · Spanish · Latin script

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

Josu is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 89th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Spanish and Catalan, written in the Latin script.

rarermore common
  • HNHonduras1 in 60
  • SVEl Salvador1 in 225
  • AUAustralia1 in 314

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

≈1.3M

across 9 countries

#218

of 16M given names

4

recorded for this name

Sources
589

6.5M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 60

Honduras

Spellings & scripts

JoshuaLatin · English5.5M records
조수Hangul · Korean19 records
ᲯოშუაGeorgian · Georgian11 records
ҶошуаCyrillic · Tajik0 records

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Joshua in US United States, AU Australia, PH Philippines and 14 more, Josue in BR Brazil, HN Honduras, MX Mexico and 8 more and Josua in ID Indonesia, ZA South Africa.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin

No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.

Sources 1

Attested across 9 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

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

Where Josu is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#89938,2504.8M rec.1 in 355938KJoshua589
AU Australia#44369,612167K rec.263Joshua328
MX Mexico#181285,660197K rec.390Josue196
AR Argentina#416208,11092K rec.565Josue84
PH Philippines#73196,80273K rec.listedJoshua168
GB United Kingdom#180194,154131K rec.1KJoshua277
HN Honduras#2154,00073K rec.1 in 60203KJosue70
PE Peru#219149,80995K rec.#13Josue93
VE Venezuela#178147,089100K rec.Josue67
SV El Salvador#20120,39868K rec.Josue76
BR Brazil#279112,14959K rec.1 in 1.9K112KJosue152
CA Canada#108109,93158K rec.44Joshua238

Roughly 938K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 355). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

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

Languages

  • Spanish31K72%
  • Catalan6.1K14%
  • English1.7K4%
  • Portuguese8382%
  • French5281%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Spanish31,41772%
Catalan6,10614%
English1,7394%
Portuguese8382%
French5281%

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

Josu is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Bangla given name349 records spelled Josu42 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, Spain, United Kingdom

    Languages: Bangla, Hindi, Khmer

    Also written Jose, Jasa, Josh, José, Jos

  • Finnish given name156 records spelled Josu3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Finland, Spain

    Languages: Finnish, Estonian

    Also written Jösu

  • Hindi surname103 records spelled Josu131 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, Philippines, United Kingdom

    Languages: Hindi, English, Vietnamese

    Also written Joshi, Josie, Josi, Joshhi

45 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

Josu is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In nap, alternative form of juso (found in the Ritmo cassinese)

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

  • In Latvian, pilsēta Korejas Republikā (Dienvidkorejā; "Yosu"), Čollanamdo provincē, osta Korejas šauruma krastā, 295400 iedzīvotāju (2007. g.)

    as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)

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.

Notable people with this name

19201940196019802000Josu Iriondo, b. 1938Josu Juaristi, b. 1964Josu Urrutia, b. 1968Josu Sarriegi, b. 1979Josu Agirre, b. 1981Josu Etxaniz, b. 1985Josu Hernáez, b. 1985Josu Esnaola, b. 1986Josu Zabala López, b. 1993Josu Etxeberria, b. 2000

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 24 sources across 17 countries.

Official registers attesting Josu
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
ES SpainINE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)6.1K#357
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)6.1K#775
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)49#8,341
EC EcuadorINEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024)31
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)30#16,622
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)14#101,339
FI FinlandDVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register)14
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)202610
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)10#134,601
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20176
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)5#10,856
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)4#28,383

Reference works 2

  • Wikipedia given-name 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 · 94 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Josu?
We estimate roughly 1.3 million people bear Josu (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Josu have the most bearers?
We estimate about 938 thousand people bear Josu in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled joshua.
Where is Josu most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Josu is densest in Honduras — about 1 in 60 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is Josu compared with other names?
In the United States, Josu is the 89th most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
Is Josu a male or female name?
Josu is a male 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.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/josu

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, “Josu” — the 89th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Josu parses inside a full name →