girls:
686.1k births since 1880
#37 (99th percentile)
boys:
9.6k births since 1880
#1204 (74th percentile)
overall:
695.6k births since 1880
#85 (99th percentile)
The name Shirley is the #85 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 695,640 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #37 (99.4% percentile) for all time with 686,089 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #1,204 (73.7% percentile) for all time with 9,551 births since 1880.
Shirley has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Shirley has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.6% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1884, the name was more popular for boys (53.9% boys from 1880 to 1883), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (98.6% girls from 1884 to 2023).
For girls, Shirley reached its peak popularity in 1935, achieving the 99.8% percentile (ranked #2) with 38,982 births per million. The name was most common in 1935, with 38,982 births per million (ranked 99.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2005, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Shirley ranks #815 for girls (14.0% percentile) with 78 births per million, which is 0.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Shirley reached its peak popularity in 1935, achieving the 53.2% percentile (ranked #242) with 407 births per million. The name was most common in 1935, with 407 births per million (ranked 53.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shirley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Shirley.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shirley", 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 Shirley.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Shirley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Shirley is pronounced as SHER-lee, 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 Shirley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shirley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shirley, 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 ER1 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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