girls:
238.6k births since 1907
#170 (97th percentile)
boys:
648 births since 1929
#3939 (14th percentile)
overall:
239.3k births since 1907
#338 (96th percentile)
The name Sheila is the #338 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 239,254 recorded births since 1907. This represents the 95.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.6% of all names). For girls, it ranks #170 (97.0% percentile) for all time with 238,606 births since 1907. For boys, it ranks #3,939 (14.1% percentile) for all time with 648 births since 1929.
Sheila first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1907 (1907 for girls and 1929 for boys).
The name Sheila has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Sheila reached its peak popularity in 1963, achieving the 93.6% percentile (ranked #50) with 4,378 births per million. The name was most common in 1963, with 4,378 births per million (ranked 93.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Sheila ranks #851 for girls (10.1% percentile) with 58 births per million, which is 1.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Sheila reached its peak popularity in 1962, achieving the 3.7% percentile (ranked #634) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1967, with 15 births per million (ranked 3.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1989.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sheila".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sheila.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sheila", 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 Sheila.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Sheila. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Sheila is pronounced as SHEE-luh, which has 2 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 Sheila? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sheila. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sheila, 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 IY1 L AH0) 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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