girls:
277 births since 1968
#5439 (5th percentile)
boys:
501 births since 1980
#4085 (11th percentile)
overall:
778 births since 1968
#6961 (10th percentile)
The name Shiva is the #6,961 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 778 recorded births since 1968. This represents the 10.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 10.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #4,085 (10.9% percentile) for all time with 501 births since 1980. For girls, it ranks #5,439 (4.8% percentile) for all time with 277 births since 1968.
Shiva first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1968 (1968 for girls and 1980 for boys). Birth data for Shiva is available in 49 out of the 56 years between 1968 and 2023 (38 years for boys and 36 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 Shiva has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for boys (64.4% of all recorded births). In 2023, 100.0% of babies named Shiva were boys. Interestingly, until around 1995, the name was more popular for girls (67.9% girls from 1968 to 1994), but since then it has been more commonly used for boys (77.2% boys from 1995 to 2023).
For boys, Shiva reached its peak popularity in 2002, achieving the 2.1% percentile (ranked #796) with 11 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 13 births per million (ranked 2.0% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2015, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Shiva is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #893 (2.0% percentile) with 13 births per million.
For girls, Shiva reached its peak popularity in 1993, achieving the 0.9% percentile (ranked #857) with 7 births per million. The name was most common in 1993, with 7 births per million (ranked 0.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Shiva".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Shiva.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Shiva", 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 Shiva.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Shiva. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Shiva is pronounced as SHEE-vuh, 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 Shiva? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Shiva. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Shiva, 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 IY1 V 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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