Humanverse

Shada vs Shawna

American parents have registered 45,640 Shawnas since 1880, against 596 Shadas. Shawna is still ahead, with 9 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Shada against Shawna, 1880 to 2025 0 600 1.2k 1.8k 2.4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Shada Shawna

Each line is every baby given the name that year, girls and boys added together — the only count that means the same thing for both names. A line breaks where the name fell below five babies in a year — the point at which the SSA stops publishing it — rather than being drawn through a figure nobody published. A single published year in a gap shows as a dot.

Who was ahead

Shawna has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1941 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2009, when Shada had 14 and Shawna had 88.

Side by side

  Shada Shawna
Total US births 59645,640
Most in one year 492,090
Babies in 2025 under 59
Estimated living today 58043,000
Median age today 3345
Peak year 19891977
Best rank 2,371st girls139th girls
Rank in 2025 unranked10,107th
First recorded 19721941
Girls / boys 596 / 045,531 / 109

A rank is a position within one sex’s list for one year, so the two rank rows are not subtracted from one another and the winning column is not marked on them. The living figure is a life-table estimate, not a count.

Which name is older

Half of the Shawnas alive today are over 45; half the Shadas are over 33. That is 12 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

How much commoner the name is in that state than it is nationally, from births recorded since 1910.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Shada Shawna
France 45155
England and Wales 16154

Every spelling a country files separately is added together, over whatever years that country publishes — which is not the same range in any two of them, so read the columns against each other and not the rows.

Compare something else

Related comparisons

Social Security Administration birth records, 1880–2025, public domain. Full histories: Shada and Shawna.