Shay

At the 2020 census, 9,066 Americans bore the surname Shay — 3,818th out of 156,621 surnames on file. That is about one person in 33,000.

By the numbers

People: 9,066
Rank: 3,818th
How common: 1 in 33,000
Per 100,000: 3.0

Where the name comes from

Origin Irish

Variant of Shea, from Irish Ó Séaghdha.

Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Who bears the name

How people with the surname Shay described their own race and Hispanic origin at the 2020 census:

White, not Hispanic 85.4%
Two or more races, not Hispanic 3.8%
Hispanic or Latino 3.0%
Asian or Pacific Islander, not Hispanic 3.0%
Black, not Hispanic 2.9%
American Indian or Alaska Native, not Hispanic 2.0%

Notable people called Shay

Wendy Shay (born 1996)Ghanaian musician

People named Shay with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).

Surnames like Shay

Also a first name

Shay has been given to 13,251 American babies as a first name since 1932, peaking in 2022. See it as a given name.

Try it on yourself

Source: US Census Bureau, Frequently Occurring Surnames, 2020. The Census describes the file as the surnames borne by 100 or more people; rarer names are not published. The line is not quite exact, and 617 published names come in under it, the smallest at 92 people. Race and Hispanic origin are self-reported. Rates are worked out against the 298.9 million people the file's own figures are calculated on, which is fewer than the census counted in all: the difference is everyone whose surname was too rare to publish.