Jake
- Pronunciation
- [Jake]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Abbreviation Of Jacob.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Jake
Jake originated as a medieval English short form of Jacob (see separate entry on Jacob for the Hebrew Ya'akov etymology meaning "supplanter" or "heel-grabber"). Jake has been used as a casual diminutive of Jacob for centuries, transitioning from nickname to standalone first name in 20th-century American naming.
The name's most influential modern bearer is American actor Jake Gyllenhaal (born 1980), whose career through Brokeback Mountain (2005), Donnie Darko, Nightcrawler, and various other films anchored the name in millennial-era American cultural memory. Earlier, the cultural figure Jake LaMotta (1922–2017, the boxer whose life inspired Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, 1980) gave the name an additional Italian-American boxing register.
Jake held a US top-50 boys' rank from 1990 through 2010 — about two decades of consistent American popularity. The name has receded slightly since but remains in steady use. The name's appeal is its compact masculine register — one short syllable, hard consonants, instantly readable, and tonal versatility across casual and formal registers. The longer formal Jacob is sometimes used as Jake's official-document version. Common nicknames are scarce since Jake is itself a nickname-shape — Jakey and the rare J each occasionally appear; the alternate spelling Jakob (the German form) is occasionally used. International variants are minimal since Jake is essentially English; the related Jacob family across European languages provides adjacent cultural anchors — Giacomo (Italian), Jacques (French), Jacobo (Spanish), and the original Hebrew Ya'akov.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Jake
US Popularity History (1999–2025)
Annual US births named Jake by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2004 with 4,471 boys named Jake (boy rank #98 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #457 for boys (682 US births). That's 359 places below its 2004 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 Jake 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 Jake the strongest states are New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #152 | 615 |
| 2 | New York | #181 | 1,096 |
| 3 | Rhode Island | #183 | 25 |
| 4 | Connecticut | #192 | 182 |
| 5 | Massachusetts | #197 | 324 |
| 6 | Hawaii | #226 | 26 |
| 7 | North Dakota | #253 | 16 |
| 8 | Florida | #254 | 772 |
| 9 | California | #319 | 1,263 |
| 10 | Mississippi | #320 | 99 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Jake in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Famous People Named Jake
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Jake.
- Jake Gyllenhaal — Movie Actor (1980)
Looking for names like Jake?
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 Jake to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Jake against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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