Josée
given name · Latin script
Meaning: French feminine form of Joseph, from Hebrew Yosef 'he will add'
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ʒoze/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Josée is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Canada than in any other country. In Luxembourg it is the 58th most common given name.
- CACanada≈1 in 3.8K(inferred from the name graph)
- BEBelgium≈1 in 9.8K
- FRFrance≈1 in 38K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Canada (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 258 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 3.8K (inferred from the name graph)
≈10,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Canada, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Josee in CA Canada, FR France, BE Belgium and 3 more and Josèe in CD Congo - Kinshasa.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
French feminine form of Joseph, from Hebrew Yosef 'he will add'.
Sources 1
- Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
Attested across 24 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Josée counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CA Canada | #358 | ≈10,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.8K | 2 | Josee | 215 |
| MG Madagascar | #677 | ≈4,000 est. | ≈1 in 6.7K | — | Josée | 9 |
| CD Congo - Kinshasa | #493 | ≈3,500 est. | ≈1 in 29K | 3 | Josèe | 8 |
| FR France | — | ≈1,800 est. | ≈1 in 38K | 2.8K | Josee | 202 |
| CM Cameroon | #533 | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 16K | — | Josee | 7 |
| RW Rwanda | #337 | ≈1,500 est. | ≈1 in 8.4K | — | Josee | 7 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 1,391 | 1 in 12K | 1.4K | Josee | 32 |
| BE Belgium | #762 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 9.8K | 5 | Josee | 43 |
| LU Luxembourg | #58 | ≈120 est. | ≈1 in 5.4K | — | Josée | 7 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); Statbel — Prénoms nouveau-nés (newborns); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Josée is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In French, a female given name, masculine equivalent José
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
French: feminine form of JOSEPH , at one time commonly used in the combination Marie-Josée .
as a word
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Josée Lavalb. 1911FRcountess c. 1906—1990
- Josée Dayanb. 1943FRFrench film director
- Josée Drevonb. 1953FRFrench actress
- Josée Vernerb. 1959CACanadian politician
- Josée Deschênesb. 1961CACanadian actress
- Marie-Castille Mention-Schaarb. 1963FRnot in their usual nameFrench film director and film producer
- Josée Chouinardb. 1969CAfigure skater
- Josée Bélangerb. 1986CACanadian soccer player
- Josée Nahib. 1989CIIvorian footballer
- Josée Deshaiesb. 2000CAFrench-Canadian cinematographer
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 17 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 1.4K | #1,050 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017) | — | 475 | #3,316 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024) | 1972 | 200 | #1,183 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 23 | #10,770 |
| BE Belgium | Statbel — Prénoms nouveau-nés (newborns) | 2024 | 5 | #1,326 |
| CD Congo - Kinshasa | Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names | — | 3 | #233 |
| CA Canada | Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender | 2023 | 2 | #1,491 |
| CA Canada | Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender | 2022 | 1 | #2,258 |
| NL Netherlands | Babynamen — Lijst met meer dan 22.000 namen (Amelia King, 2020) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Josée mean, and where does it come from?
- French feminine form of Joseph, from Hebrew Yosef 'he will add'. Recorded by Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education).
- How do you pronounce Josée?
- A machine transcription gives /ʒoze/ (IPA) for French.
- Is Josée a male or female name?
- Josée is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- What are other forms of the name Josée?
- In the etymology graph, Marie, Josefina and Josephine are forms of the same name in other languages; Joséphine is a recorded short or pet form.
- In which country does Josée have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 10 thousand people named Josée in Canada, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled josee.
- How common is the name Josée?
- In the Netherlands, the national register counted 1,391 people named Josée, about 1 in 12 thousand residents.
- How common is Josée compared with other names?
- In Canada, Josée is the 358th most common given name of 188,338 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Josée?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/jos%C3%A9eThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Josée” — the 358th most common given name in Canada. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.