Humanverse

Shamaya vs Sharon

American parents have registered 726,130 Sharons since 1880, against 833 Shamayas. Sharon is still ahead, with 179 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Shamaya against Sharon, 1880 to 2025 0 8k 16k 24k 32k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Shamaya Sharon

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

Sharon has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1900 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2006, when Shamaya had 57 and Sharon had 485.

Side by side

  Shamaya Sharon
Total US births 833726,130
Most in one year 5728,590
Babies in 2025 5179
Estimated living today 820545,000
Median age today 2169
Peak year 20061947
Best rank 2,978th girls9th girls
Rank in 2025 14,942nd1,250th
First recorded 19801900
Girls / boys 833 / 0723,024 / 3,106

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 Sharons alive today are over 69; half the Shamayas are over 21. That is 48 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 Shamaya Sharon
England and Wales 61,020

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: Shamaya and Sharon.