girls:
3k births since 1939
#3192 (44th percentile)
boys:
422.3k births since 1925
#80 (98th percentile)
overall:
425.2k births since 1925
#164 (98th percentile)
The name Sean is the #164 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 425,243 recorded births since 1925. This represents the 97.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #80 (98.3% percentile) for all time with 422,289 births since 1925. For girls, it ranks #3,192 (44.1% percentile) for all time with 2,954 births since 1939.
Sean first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1925 (1925 for boys and 1939 for girls). Birth data for Sean is available in 95 out of the 99 years between 1925 and 2023 (95 years for boys and 72 years for girls). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Sean has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Sean reached its peak popularity in 1990, achieving the 95.3% percentile (ranked #37) with 5,584 births per million. The name was most common in 1986, with 6,133 births per million (ranked 94.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1989, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Sean ranks #391 for boys (57.1% percentile) with 404 births per million, which is 6.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Sean reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 12.1% percentile (ranked #710) with 54 births per million. The name was most common in 1988, with 54 births per million (ranked 12.1% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2020.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sean".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sean.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sean", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sean.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Sean. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 55.3% confident that Sean is pronounced as shawn, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is sheen, at 23.7% confidence, with 1 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Sean? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sean. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sean, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like SH AO1 N) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
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