Jonathon
- Pronunciation
- [Jo-na-thon]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Jehovah Has Given. In The Bible Jonathan Son Of King Saul Was Noted For Manliness: Generosity And Unselfishness. He Saved David's Life When Saul Would Have Killed Him.
- Origin
- Hebrew
About the Name Jonathon
Jonathon is a variant spelling of Jonathan, one of the great Hebrew names of the Old Testament. The Hebrew Yehōnātān means "Jehovah has given" — a theophoric name expressing gratitude for divine gift. The biblical Jonathan, son of King Saul, is celebrated in the books of Samuel as a figure of exceptional loyalty, generosity, and friendship: he protected David from his father Saul's murderous jealousy, forging one of the most celebrated friendships in scripture. The spelling Jonathon, with o replacing the second a, represents a common phonetic respelling that alters the name's appearance while preserving its sound — the variant Johnathan and Johnathon recorded add the h of the English John to the Hebrew form.
The biblical Jonathan's qualities — manliness, generosity, and unselfishness as Historical records note — have given the name a moral resonance that has kept it in continuous use across Jewish, Christian, and broadly Western naming traditions for more than two thousand years. The variant spelling Jonathon offers a small degree of visual distinctiveness while retaining all of that cultural and scriptural weight.
Jonathon first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 2000, the year it peaked at #226, and accumulated 11,838 top-1000 births before dropping out of the charts after 2016, when it ranked #987 with 207 births. Recorded variants include Johnathan and Johnathon.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Jonathon
US Popularity History (2000–2016)
Annual US births named Jonathon by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2000 with 1,499 boys named Jonathon (boy rank #226 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2016, ranked #987 for boys (207 US births). That's 761 places below its 2000 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Jonathon Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Jonathon the strongest states are Kentucky, Wisconsin, Indiana.
Strongest boys-name states
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Jonathon in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Johnathan | Jehovah Has Given. In The Bible Jonathan Son Of King Saul Was Noted For Manliness: Generosity And Unselfishness. He Saved David's Life When Saul Would Have Killed Him. | Male | Hebrew |
| Johnathon | Jehovah Has Given. In The Bible Jonathan Son Of King Saul Was Noted For Manliness: Generosity And Unselfishness. He Saved David's Life When Saul Would Have Killed Him. | Male | Hebrew |
Looking for names like Jonathon?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Jonathon to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Jonathon against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).