Josiah
149,420 recorded births · active 1880–2025
Compare Josiah →Living-age distribution
The median living Josiah is 12. If you meet a Josiah, there's about a 70% chance they're between 4 and 24 years old.
Popularity arc
Peak Josiah: 2017. Down 14% from peak.
Projected: the dashed 10-year forecast (Holt damped-trend exponential smoothing, fit to recent years), with a shaded 95% interval.
Gender balance
Josiah is almost always given to male babies — 99.7% male.
Rarity
Josiah ranks #509 out of 105,966 names ever recorded by the SSA.
Geographic fingerprint
Josiahs are 1.5x more common in the West than the national average.
Predictive modeling
Three statistical models, all fit to Josiah's own SSA history plus the historical behavior of every other name in the dataset.
Peak popularity prediction
Josiah's modeled peak was #69 in 2019 — its trend isn't projected to beat that.
Projects the trend forward, then converts share into rank using this year's popularity distribution.
This forecasts Josiah's share of births by fitting a damped-trend model to its last 146 years of data and projecting 10 years forward with a widening uncertainty band. Each projected share is then translated into a rank by comparing it against 2025's actual name-popularity distribution — so the model implicitly assumes the overall shape of that distribution doesn't shift much over the forecast window. Its trend is projected to stay below its historic best over the next 10 years, so the model treats 2019 as its peak. Milestone probabilities come from how much of each year's uncertainty band clears that milestone's rank, combined across years as if they were independent — which slightly overstates the odds for names sitting right at a threshold, since a good year is usually followed by another good year rather than an independent coin flip.Name life-cycle stage
A rule-based classifier over recent growth, momentum, and peak proximity.
Josiah is holding within 14% of its all-time peak share and growth has flattened out — it's plateaued near the top rather than still climbing or sliding.
Popularity survival model
Once a name reaches a rank tier, how long does it typically stay there before falling out?
Built from a Kaplan-Meier survival curve: every historical run any name has ever had above this tier, with runs still ongoing today counted as still in progress rather than as an exit.Josiah has been in the Top 100 tier for 12 years running.
Chance Josiah is still in Top 100 after:
Median years remaining above Top 100: ~21. Based on 668 historical Top 100 runs across every name in the dataset.