girls:
5 births since 2013
#5711 (0th percentile)
boys:
3.2k births since 1912
#2209 (52nd percentile)
overall:
3.2k births since 1912
#4810 (38th percentile)
The name Shepard is the #4,810 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 3,205 recorded births since 1912. This represents the 37.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 37.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,209 (51.8% percentile) for all time with 3,200 births since 1912. For girls, it ranks #5,711 (0.1% percentile) for all time with 5 births since 2013.
Shepard first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1912 (1912 for boys and 2013 for girls). Birth data for Shepard is available in 94 out of the 112 years between 1912 and 2023 (94 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 Shepard has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Shepard reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 26.5% percentile (ranked #679) with 135 births per million. The name was most common in 2022, with 135 births per million (ranked 26.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 1996, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Shepard is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #682 (25.2% percentile) with 129 births per million.
For girls, Shepard reached its peak popularity in 2013, achieving the 0.0% percentile (ranked #931) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 2013, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2013.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shepard".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Shepherd. View all variations of Shepherd.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shepard", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 4 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Shepherd" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Shepherd..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Shepard. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Shepard is pronounced as SHEH-perd, 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 Shepard? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shepard. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shepard, 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 P ER0 D) 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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