girls:
47.8k births since 1915
#592 (90th percentile)
boys:
111 births since 1954
#4475 (2nd percentile)
overall:
47.9k births since 1915
#1105 (86th percentile)
The name Shelia is the #1,105 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 47,891 recorded births since 1915. This represents the 85.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 85.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #592 (89.7% percentile) for all time with 47,780 births since 1915. For boys, it ranks #4,475 (2.4% percentile) for all time with 111 births since 1954.
Shelia first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1915 (1915 for girls and 1954 for boys). Birth data for Shelia is available in 107 out of the 109 years between 1915 and 2023 (107 years for girls and 16 years for boys). 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 Shelia has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Shelia reached its peak popularity in 1959, achieving the 78.1% percentile (ranked #169) with 1,098 births per million. The name was most common in 1962, with 1,120 births per million (ranked 78.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Shelia ranks #945 for girls (0.2% percentile) with 4 births per million, which is 0.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Shelia reached its peak popularity in 1965, achieving the 0.9% percentile (ranked #637) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1965, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1971.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shelia".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Shelia.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shelia", 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 Shelia.
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Shelia. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 55.6% confident that Shelia is pronounced as SHEE-lee-uh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SHEEL-yuh, at 17.8% confidence, with 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 Shelia? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shelia. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shelia, 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 IY0 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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