Joan is the medieval English feminine of John — from the Hebrew Yochanan ("God is gracious"). Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431) — the French peasant girl who at 17 led the army of Charles VII to relieve the Siege of Orléans and turn the Hundred Years' War, then was captured, tried for heresy by the English, and burned at the stake; canonized as a saint in 1920. Joan Didion (1934-2021) — *the American essayist whose Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) reshaped American nonfiction prose*.
Subject of countless biographies, films, and the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.
Joan does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Joan reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.