Name Awesome

Pooja

Girls' name

Worship

Pooja has been given to 1,981 babies in the U.S. since 1976. It was used fewer than 5 times in 2025, so it doesn't appear in the latest year's list — today it's a genuinely uncommon pick. Its peak year was 1997, with 117 recorded.

Babies named Pooja, 2018

1 in 703,000

Pooja over time, 1880–2025

Girls
05010015018801900192019401960198020002020

Based on births in the U.S. Babies given the name each year. Hover the chart — or focus it and use the arrow keys — for any year. Gaps mean the name was given fewer than 5 times that year; these counts are unpublished.

Pooja: meaning, origin, and history

Worship

Hindi

What Pooja means

Pooja means “worship”, associated with pūjā.

Dictionary etymologyReferences, data & attribution

Borrowed from Hindi पूजा (pūjā, “worship”), from Sanskrit.

Excerpt from Wiktionary: Pooja (English) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Wiktionary material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Origin, language, and formation

Pooja is used in English. Its origins include Hindi.

Pooja comes through Hindi पूजा.

Pronunciation and spelling

In English, Pooja is pronounced /ˈpuːdʒə/.

American usage and historical context

In the United States, 1,981 girls were recorded with the name Pooja between 1976 and 2018. Its highest annual count was 117 in 1997; its best national rank was #1,425 in 1997.

How common is Pooja?

Pooja had fewer than 5 recorded uses in 2025, so these figures use 2018, the last year it was published.

Among all babies, 2018
1 in 703,000
5 of 3,516,853 births
Among girls only
1 in 340,000
<0.01% of girls
Rank, 2018
Unranked
Fewer than 5 uses
Coin-flip room size
487,541 kids
Even odds of a second one

Where Pooja sits on the popularity scale

Rarest published (5 a year)#1 — Olivia (13,544)

Chance at least one other child shares the name

If the other children were drawn at random from the 2018 national name distribution. Real classrooms cluster by region and community, so treat these as a floor, not a ceiling.

Class of 20Under 1%
Class of 30Under 1%
Grade of 100Under 1%
School of 500Under 1%

Put another way: gather 487,541 children born in 2018 and it's an even bet that one of them is another Pooja. In a class of 30 the chance is Under 1%.

When Poojas were born

Half of everyone ever recorded as Pooja was born before 1996 — so the typical Pooja is around 29 today.

Median birth year
1996
About 29 years old
Biggest decade
1990s
48.3% of all use
Born in the last 25 years
61.2%
A modern name
Recorded since 1950
1,981
People you could plausibly meet
Choose a decade

1990s — 48.3% of all recorded uses (957).

Is Pooja rising or falling?

Rank movement and count movement can disagree — the number of distinct names in use keeps growing, so a name holding a steady count still slides down the list. Both are shown.

Rank vs 1 year ago
—
Not ranked then
Rank vs 5 years ago
New entry
Not ranked then
Rank vs 10 years ago
—
Not ranked then
Births vs 10 years ago
—
Not published both years
Share of its own peak
0%
Peak was 1997 (117)
Years since peak
28
Years
Year-to-year steadiness
Shifting
24.0% average annual change
Best rank ever
#1,425
1997

Spellings of Pooja

Pooja is not the most common spelling — Sonja is, with 49.3% against Pooja's 2.5%.

Grouped by closeness of spelling (up to two letter changes), same sex, with a floor on all-time use. It catches Sophia/Sofia and Aiden/Ayden, and misses spellings that sound alike but look different, like Sean and Shawn.

Where Pooja is used

Across 1910–2025, Pooja was most concentrated in New Jersey — about 1 in 14,286 girls, against 1 in 85,471 across all states with data. It was least common in Texas (1 in —).

07 per 100,000

Most concentrated

  1. 1New Jersey1 in 14,286
  2. 2California1 in 50,000
  3. 3New York1 in 50,000
  4. 4Illinois1 in 100,000
  5. 5Michigan1 in 100,000
  6. 6Florida1 in —
  7. 7Georgia1 in —
  8. 8Massachusetts1 in —

Shading is the share of that state's recorded girls given this name, not the raw count — otherwise the map would just show which states are biggest. Unshaded states have no published records for this period. U.S. birth records suppress state-year counts below 5; state counts therefore don't add up to the national total. Every state links to its full rankings. Pooja has too little recent state data to map, so this covers all years from 1910.

Pooja around the world

Where Pooja ranks in official birth records elsewhere in the world. Rankings only — the number of births isn’t comparable between places, so it isn’t shown.

  • England & Wales
    1996–2016
    #4,763
    in 2016
  • France
    1994–2014
    #5,492
    in 2014
  • Canada
    1991–2009
    #2,562
    in 2009
  • South Australia
    1978–2001
    #711
    in 2001

Popularity data from Office for National Statistics, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, Statistics Canada and Consumer and Business Services (South Australia). ONS data under Open Government Licence v3.0. INSEE data under Licence Ouverte / Etalab 2.0. StatCan data under Statistics Canada Open Licence. CBS SA data under CC BY 4.0.

Pooja by the numbers

The raw record for each sex the name is used for.

As a girl's name

Rank in 2025
Unranked
Trend vs 5 yrs ago
—
Best rank ever
#1,425
1997
Peak year
1997
117 that year
First recorded
1976
Last recorded
2018
All-time count
1,981
Count in 2025
Under 5

Names similar to Pooja

Matched on shared beginnings and endings, similar length, and comparable popularity.

PoonamPoorviZojaPoorna

Sibling names for Pooja

Names from the same era and popularity tier — the two things that make a sibling set feel deliberate — skipping lookalike spellings and shared initials.

Explore around Pooja

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