girls:
147.9k births since 1913
#265 (95th percentile)
boys:
16.4k births since 1880
#908 (80th percentile)
overall:
164.3k births since 1880
#456 (94th percentile)
The name Shelby is the #456 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 164,276 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 94.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #265 (95.4% percentile) for all time with 147,925 births since 1913. For boys, it ranks #908 (80.2% percentile) for all time with 16,351 births since 1880.
Shelby has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1913 for girls).
The name Shelby has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 90.0% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 90.2% of babies named Shelby were girls. Interestingly, until around 1936, the name was more popular for boys (92.1% boys from 1880 to 1935), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (91.8% girls from 1936 to 2023).
For girls, Shelby reached its peak popularity in 1991, achieving the 96.2% percentile (ranked #33) with 5,026 births per million. The name was most common in 1991, with 5,026 births per million (ranked 96.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1995, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Shelby ranks #545 for girls (42.5% percentile) with 254 births per million, which is 5.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Shelby reached its peak popularity in 1991, achieving the 48.7% percentile (ranked #390) with 247 births per million. The name was most common in 1991, with 247 births per million (ranked 48.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Shelby ranks #868 for boys (4.7% percentile) with 26 births per million, which is 10.6% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shelby".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Shelby.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shelby", 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 Shelby.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Shelby. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Shelby is pronounced as SHEHL-bee, 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 Shelby? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shelby. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shelby, 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 EH1 L B IY0) 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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