Jordan

Meaning & origin

Few names have crossed centuries and genders as easily as Jordan. Medieval parents of both sexes used it in honor of the baptismal river; modern American parents rediscovered it in the 1980s, when its surname sound and its association with Michael Jordan, then at the height of his fame, pushed it up the charts to a peak in 1991. The trajectory has pointed downward ever since, a slow descent rather than a collapse.

In 2025 Jordan stands at No. 131, reaching about 1 in every 625 American newborns, and it remains one of the country's most evenly unisex choices. Its footprint is strongest in Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, and Alaska, an unusual coastal-and-frontier spread that reflects how broadly the name settled in during its 1990s heyday. Parents drawn to it today tend to like exactly that: a name every generation recognizes that no longer dominates any classroom.

Jordan began as a river, not a person: the Hebrew Yarden, from yarad ("to descend, flow down"), describing the river's drop toward the Dead Sea. Because Christ was baptized in the Jordan, crusaders and pilgrims carried flasks of its water home to baptize their children, and by the twelfth century Jordan was a common given name across England and the Continent, used for both boys and girls. It faded into a surname after the Middle Ages, then returned to American use in the surname-name wave of the late twentieth century, climbing steeply through the 1980s for both sexes.

Read more: Jordan on Wikipedia