girls:
33k births since 1932
#768 (87th percentile)
boys:
305.7k births since 1931
#115 (98th percentile)
overall:
338.7k births since 1931
#216 (97th percentile)
The name Shawn is the #216 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 338,704 recorded births since 1931. This represents the 97.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #115 (97.5% percentile) for all time with 305,679 births since 1931. For girls, it ranks #768 (86.6% percentile) for all time with 33,025 births since 1932.
Shawn first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1931 (1931 for boys and 1932 for girls). Birth data for Shawn is available in 90 out of the 93 years between 1931 and 2023 (89 years for boys and 88 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 Shawn has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 90.2% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Shawn reached its peak popularity in 1973, achieving the 96.0% percentile (ranked #27) with 7,096 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 7,096 births per million (ranked 96.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1975, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Shawn ranks #530 for boys (41.9% percentile) with 238 births per million, which is 3.4% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Shawn reached its peak popularity in 1971, achieving the 78.5% percentile (ranked #166) with 1,063 births per million. The name was most common in 1970, with 1,076 births per million (ranked 78.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Shawn ranks #944 for girls (0.3% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 0.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shawn".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Sean. View all variations of Sean.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shawn", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 49 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Sean" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Sean..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Shawn. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Shawn is pronounced as shawn, which has 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 Shawn? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shawn. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shawn, 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker