Joy
143,324 recorded births · active 1883–2025
Compare Joy →Living-age distribution
The median living Joy is 56. If you meet a Joy, there's about a 70% chance they're between 23 and 74 years old.
Popularity arc
Peak Joy: 1974. Down 76% from peak.
Projected: the dashed 10-year forecast (Holt damped-trend exponential smoothing, fit to recent years), with a shaded 95% interval.
Gender balance
Joy is almost always given to female babies — 98.9% female.
Rarity
Joy ranks #527 out of 105,966 names ever recorded by the SSA.
Geographic fingerprint
Joys are 1.2x more common in the Midwest than the national average.
Predictive modeling
Three statistical models, all fit to Joy's own SSA history plus the historical behavior of every other name in the dataset.
Peak popularity prediction
Joy's modeled peak was #201 in 1974 — 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 Joy's share of births by fitting a damped-trend model to its last 142 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 1974 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.
Joy's popularity has been easing lower recently, though not sharply enough to call it a steep decline.
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.Joy isn't currently in the Top 100 tier. Estimated chance of entering it in the forecast window: 0%.
If Joy enters Top 100, chance it's still there after:
Names that do enter Top 100 have historically stayed a median of ~19 years. Based on 668 historical Top 100 runs across every name in the dataset.