Canaan — #1089 US boys' name

What the Data Says About Canaan

The Social Security Administration has registered 5,629 babies named Canaan between 1973 and 2024, spanning 52 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a boy's name, Canaan currently holds the #1089 rank among boys for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 2016, when 385 babies received it in a single year. Canaan is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 318 additional births since 1980.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Canaan performed strongest in the 2010s, accumulating 2,346 births during that ten-year window. Across the 6 decades of recorded activity, Canaan shows notable generational variation in parental adoption. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in Texas, which accounts for 449 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by Tennessee and North Carolina. In total, SSA state-level files list Canaan in 33 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Canaan in our reference dataset. These figures derive from SSA's annual national and state-level name files, which include any name appearing at least five times in a given year or state-year; names below that threshold are suppressed for privacy and therefore excluded from the totals shown here. The 5,629 total represents a lower bound — actual usage may be higher in years or states where the count fell below the disclosure floor. This page is provided for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute personal, legal, or naming advice.