girls:
496 births since 1931
#5220 (9th percentile)
boys:
36.5k births since 1881
#587 (87th percentile)
overall:
37k births since 1881
#1297 (83rd percentile)
The name Sheldon is the #1,297 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 37,044 recorded births since 1881. This represents the 83.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #587 (87.2% percentile) for all time with 36,548 births since 1881. For girls, it ranks #5,220 (8.6% percentile) for all time with 496 births since 1931.
Sheldon first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1881 (1881 for boys and 1931 for girls). Birth data for Sheldon is available in 136 out of the 143 years between 1881 and 2023 (136 years for boys and 52 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 Sheldon has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Sheldon reached its peak popularity in 1936, achieving the 55.2% percentile (ranked #233) with 426 births per million. The name was most common in 1934, with 435 births per million (ranked 54.8% percentile). Despite a low point around 2011, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Sheldon ranks #857 for boys (5.9% percentile) with 32 births per million, which is 7.4% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Sheldon reached its peak popularity in 1994, achieving the 2.3% percentile (ranked #826) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 1994, with 12 births per million (ranked 2.3% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2002.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sheldon".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sheldon.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sheldon", 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 Sheldon.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Sheldon. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Sheldon is pronounced as SHEHL-duhn, 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 Sheldon? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sheldon. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sheldon, 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 D AH0 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