girls:
5 births since 1970
#5711 (0th percentile)
boys:
727 births since 1954
#3860 (16th percentile)
overall:
732 births since 1954
#7007 (9th percentile)
The name Shem is the #7,007 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 732 recorded births since 1954. This represents the 9.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 9.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #3,860 (15.8% percentile) for all time with 727 births since 1954. For girls, it ranks #5,711 (0.1% percentile) for all time with 5 births since 1970.
Shem first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1954 (1954 for boys and 1970 for girls). Birth data for Shem is available in 60 out of the 70 years between 1954 and 2023 (60 years for boys and 1 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 Shem has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Shem reached its peak popularity in 1976, achieving the 2.7% percentile (ranked #638) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1976, with 14 births per million (ranked 2.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Shem ranks #904 for boys (0.8% percentile) with 7 births per million, which is 46.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Shem reached its peak popularity in 1970, achieving the 0.0% percentile (ranked #773) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1970, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1970.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shem".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Shem.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shem", 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 Shem.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Shem. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Shem is pronounced as shehm, which has 1 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 Shem? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shem. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shem, 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 M) 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