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Shelly vs Shereen

American parents have registered 86,610 Shellys since 1880, against 1,587 Shereens. Shelly is still ahead, with 21 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Shelly against Shereen, 1880 to 2025 0 1.3k 2.5k 3.8k 5k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Shelly Shereen

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

Shelly has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1882 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2017, when Shelly had 34 and Shereen had 6.

Side by side

  Shelly Shereen
Total US births 86,6101,587
Most in one year 4,12747
Babies in 2025 21under 5
Estimated living today 77,0001,500
Median age today 5645
Peak year 19641984
Best rank 101st girls2,111th girls
Rank in 2025 5,722ndunranked
First recorded 18821937
Girls / boys 84,420 / 2,1901,587 / 0

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 Shellys alive today are over 56; half the Shereens are over 45. That is 11 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 Shelly Shereen
France 770130
England and Wales 185196
Scotland 122106
Ireland 445

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: Shelly and Shereen.