girls:
72.6k births since 1892
#462 (92nd percentile)
boys:
1.8k births since 1893
#2968 (35th percentile)
overall:
74.3k births since 1892
#838 (89th percentile)
The name Shelley is the #838 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 74,314 recorded births since 1892. This represents the 89.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 89.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #462 (91.9% percentile) for all time with 72,561 births since 1892. For boys, it ranks #2,968 (35.2% percentile) for all time with 1,753 births since 1893.
Shelley first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1892 (1892 for girls and 1893 for boys). Birth data for Shelley is available in 128 out of the 132 years between 1892 and 2023 (112 years for girls and 98 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 Shelley has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 97.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Shelley reached its peak popularity in 1972, achieving the 83.3% percentile (ranked #125) with 1,478 births per million. The name was most common in 1972, with 1,478 births per million (ranked 83.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1973, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Shelley ranks #944 for girls (0.3% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 0.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Shelley reached its peak popularity in 1951, achieving the 6.8% percentile (ranked #567) with 24 births per million. The name was most common in 1899, with 78 births per million (ranked 1.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2001.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shelley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Shelly. View all variations of Shelly.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shelley", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 18 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Shelly" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Shelly..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Shelley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 91.5% confident that Shelley is pronounced as SHEH-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SHEH-lay, at 8.5% 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 Shelley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shelley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shelley, 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 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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