Declining since 1987, #14,942 for girls today.
Popularity of Jesica since 1966
Babies named Jesica per year in U.S. Social Security records.
Data table (by decade)
| Decade | Girls |
|---|---|
| 1960s | 30 |
| 1970s | 628 |
| 1980s | 1,879 |
| 1990s | 1,393 |
| 2000s | 644 |
| 2010s | 128 |
| 2020s | 18 |
Meaning & origin
Jesica is a modern respelling of Jessica that first appeared on U.S. birth records in 1966. It reached its peak popularity in 1987, when it was at its highest rank, but has been declining since. As of 2025, it ranks 14,942, with roughly 1 in 321,453 newborns receiving the name. The variant never cracked the top 1,000 names nationally, and its usage has been scattered across states without a strong regional concentration. Jesica reflects a broader mid-century trend of respelling familiar names, adapting a Shakespearean invention into a more phonetically intuitive form. Its trajectory since 1987 has been steadily downward, placing it firmly in the category of infrequently used names.
Jesica is a spelling variant of Jessica, a name Shakespeare created for the Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), likely derived from the biblical name Iscah (Hebrew Yiskah, 'to behold'). The Jesica form emerged in the mid-20th century as part of a trend of phonetic respellings of established names, particularly popular in the United States from the 1960s onward.
Nicknames & variants
Nicknames: Jess, Jessi, Jessa, Sica
Sibling names for Jesica
Names that share Jesica's style, for a brother or sister.
