Joyce

given name · English · Latin script

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

Joyce is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Singapore it is the 21st most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Portuguese, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: From the Breton personal name Iodoc, literally “little lord”.

rarermore common
  • SGSingapore1 in 657◐
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 696
  • CACanada1 in 952

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

≈430K ●

across 9 countries

#540 ●

of 16M given names

2 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
535 ●

5.0M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 1.0K ◐

United States

Spellings & scripts●

JoyceLatin · English●4.6M records
조이스Hangul · Korean●3 records

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●

From the Breton personal name Iodoc, literally “little lord”.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Joyce is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#121323,5594M rec.1 in 1K324KJoyce535
GB United Kingdom#119297,011308K rec.——Joyce206
PH Philippines#192102,76079K rec.——Joyce166
BR Brazil—100,072△144 rec.1 in 2.1K128KJoyce11
CA Canada#14987,43793K rec.—4Joyce198
AU Australia#26180,92294K rec.—1Joyce193
IT Italy#29628,74931K rec.—1Joyce70
ZA South Africa#7824,68726K rec.——Joyce78
SG Singapore#2116,37516K rec.——Joyce125
EG Egypt#5429,1119.1K rec.——Joyce37
FR France—4,560△13 rec.1 in 15K4.6K—10
BE Belgium#6922,7495.4K rec.—15Joyce109

Roughly 324K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 1K). 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●

  • English4.6M67%
  • Portuguese951K14%
  • Spanish225K3%
  • Swahili213K3%
  • 166K2%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English4,609,83167%
Portuguese951,00214%
Spanish225,0873%
Swahili212,8343%
165,6792%

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◐

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

  • a separate given name193K records spelled Joyce3 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Jóyce, Jôyce

  • German given name48K records spelled Joyce3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Germany, United States, Austria, United Kingdom

    Also written Jöyćé, Joeyćé

  • Portuguese given name27K records spelled Joyce41 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, United States, Poland, Philippines

    Languages: Portuguese, Polish, Spanish

    Also written Joice, Jóice, Джойс, Jôice, Joíce

93 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●

Joyce 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, from French personal name Joy; strong Connacht clan in the barony of Ross (Joyce’s Country), Galway

    as a nameIrish family names

  • In English, Occasionally used in Ireland; feminine form of Celtic masculine Jodoc, used in Brittany.

    as a nameIrish first names

  • In English, from Breton Iodoc, a saint's name; first attested Josce, Iocius c1140–50 DC (Lancashire)

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • A name occasionally used in Ireland. It is a feminine form of the Celtic masculine name Jodoc, once used in Brittany.

    as a nameIrish first names

  • In English, An English and Irish surname originating as a patronymic.

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

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●

05K10K15K20K19001950200017K · 1942

Show as table
Joyce in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1882–2025
Yearrecords
18827
18836
18857
18877
188811
188912
189017
189117
189214
189320
189422
189529
189637
189727
189840
189945
190059
190143
190269
190373
190456
190579
190677
190780
1908105
190996
1910135
1911136
1912222
1913273
1914456
1915640
1916746
19171,017
19181,261
19191,255
19201,523
19211,840
19222,016
19232,670
19243,533
19254,364
19265,704
19276,684
19287,244
19298,596
19309,658
193110,580
193211,362
193311,191
193411,459
193511,368
193611,988
193711,808
193812,698
193913,394
194014,801
194115,684
194216,728
194316,485
194414,770
194513,950
194615,209
194715,915
194814,380
194913,572
195013,415
195113,472
195213,126
195312,796
195412,088
195511,287
195611,091
195710,155
19589,034
19598,520
19607,757
19616,996
19626,096
19635,222
19644,859
19654,128
19663,399
19672,945
19682,496
19692,227
19702,030
19711,693
19721,348
19731,226
19741,263
19751,126
1976947
1977846
1978776
1979737
1980731
1981687
1982663
1983635
1984593
1985537
1986537
1987561
1988475
1989489
1990512
1991446
1992441
1993423
1994373
1995372
1996343
1997331
1998332
1999337
2000362
2001370
2002358
2003345
2004345
2005324
2006325
2007342
2008318
2009287
2010303
2011264
2012298
2013328
2014353
2015332
2016385
2017325
2018284
2019287
2020261
2021274
2022269
2023237
2024241
2025226

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 142 years between 1882–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1850190019502000Joyce Cary, b. 1888Joyce Compton, b. 1907Joyce Redman, b. 1915Joyce Van Patten, b. 1934Joyce Carol Oates, b. 1938Joyce Banda, b. 1950Joyce Beatty, b. 1950Jane Seymour, b. 1951Joyce DiDonato, b. 1969Joyce Jonathan, b. 1989

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 111 sources across 65 countries.

Official registers attesting Joyce
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020324K#157
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)202271K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—70K#425
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—42K#881
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201034K#1,022
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200034K#948
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202033K#1,052
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—16K#252
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024)20244.6K#309
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)2020773—
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—648#2,300
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020620#157

Reference works 8

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

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

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 1,041 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Joyce?
We estimate roughly 430 thousand people bear Joyce (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Joyce have the most bearers?
We estimate about 324 thousand people bear Joyce in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled joyce.
How common is Joyce compared with other names?
In the United States, Joyce is the 121st most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
Is Joyce a male or female name?
Joyce 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 Joyce mean?
Recorded meaning: From the Breton personal name Iodoc, literally “little lord”.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/joyce

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, “Joyce” — the 121st most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Joyce parses inside a full name →