girls:
264 births since 1979
#5452 (5th percentile)
boys:
12 births since 1986
#4574 (0th percentile)
overall:
276 births since 1979
#7463 (4th percentile)
The name Shemaiah is the #7,463 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 276 recorded births since 1979. This represents the 3.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 3.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #5,452 (4.6% percentile) for all time with 264 births since 1979. For boys, it ranks #4,574 (0.2% percentile) for all time with 12 births since 1986.
Shemaiah first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1979 (1979 for girls and 1986 for boys). Birth data for Shemaiah is available in 31 out of the 45 years between 1979 and 2023 (30 years for girls and 2 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 Shemaiah has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 95.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Shemaiah reached its peak popularity in 2004, achieving the 1.2% percentile (ranked #926) with 8 births per million. The name was most common in 2004, with 8 births per million (ranked 1.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Shemaiah ranks #946 for girls (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 43.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Shemaiah reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 0.1% percentile (ranked #704) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1986, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.1% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2002.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shemaiah".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Shamaya. View all variations of Shamaya.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shemaiah", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 10 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Shamaya" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Shamaya..
Our model has identified 18 different pronunciations for the name Shemaiah. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 17.1% confident that Shemaiah is pronounced as sheh-MAY-uh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is sheh-MAI-uh, at 14.6% confidence, with 3 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 Shemaiah? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shemaiah. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shemaiah, 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 EH0 M EY1 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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