Janet
Masculine · “God is gracious”
Janet is given to girls far more often — 556,776 girls against 1,515 boys since 1880. See Janet as a girl name
Janet ends in a French diminutive that English froze. The -et and -ette suffixes arrived attached to borrowed names, meaning something like small or dear, and English took a handful of them and stopped treating them as diminutives at all: Janet, Juliet, Violet and Harriet are full names here and were affectionate forms in the language they came from.
How old is the name Janet?
Janet first appears in US birth records in 1917 — 108 years ago. The typical Janet alive today was born around 1951, making them about 74 years old. About 900 people named Janet are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Janet most popular?
Janet peaked in 1937, reaching #967 nationally. See the whole 1937 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From A Hebrew sentence-name behind John to Janet
The story of Janet
Janet Guthrie was an aerospace engineer and a physicist who could not get funding for a racing team, and who in the middle of the nineteen seventies became the first woman to qualify for the Indianapolis five hundred and for the Daytona five hundred. The reception was hostile in ways that are well documented: drivers said publicly that she should not be there, and she finished ninth at Indianapolis in a car she had helped build, driving with a broken wrist. Her helmet and suit are in the Smithsonian. The name she carried was, in that decade, an ordinary American woman's name of a particular vintage, which is part of why the story reads the way it does: nothing about it was exotic except what she did with it.
Meaning
God is gracious
The base is the French feminine of John, and the Hebrew sentence-name behind it means that God has shown favor. The reading is settled. The ending contributes affection rather than sense, and it has stopped doing even that in English, where nobody hearing this name thinks of it as a diminutive of anything.
How the name formed
- A Hebrew sentence-name behind John
- Jeanne in French, with a diminutive ending
- Janet as a standard Scottish name for centuries
- Widely used across America in the twentieth century
Related forms: Jeannette · Seonaid · Juanita
Pronouncing Janet
JAN-it
Two syllables, stress on the first, with the second reduced almost to nothing. French says the fuller form with the stress at the back and a nasal first vowel, which makes the same name sound quite different.
Nicknames for Janet
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1917
- Most boys named
- 194346 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #967reached in 1937
- Change vs 1994
- −33.3%6 in 1995, from 9
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Janet in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Jeannette in French — related form
- Seonaid in Scottish Gaelic — related form
- Juanita in Spanish — related form
Janets among us
people named Janet are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Janet sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- It is completely familiar, universally spellable and has never needed explaining.
- Jan, Nettie and Jessie are three very different registers from one certificate.
- It has an unbroken record in Scotland going back several centuries.
- It is strongly associated with one American generation, and that association arrives first.
- Janette and Jeanette are close enough to be confused in writing.
- The spelling is on the register for boys as well, in very small numbers.
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What they receive
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Janet
Masculine
Frequently asked
- How many Janets are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 900 people named Janet are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Janet in 2025?
- Janet is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 boy names.
- Will my child share the name Janet with classmates?
- Janet will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More J names
The most-given names starting with J, all years combined.
James#6 · John#23 · Joseph#29 · Joshua#66 · Jason#165 · Jacob#43 · Jeffrey#552 · Jonathan#89
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Janet? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Janet and another name?
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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