Humanverse

Sharday vs Shaun

American parents have registered 73,610 Shauns since 1880, against 797 Shardays. Shaun is still ahead, with 79 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sharday against Shaun, 1880 to 2025 0 2k 4k 6k 8k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sharday Shaun

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

Shaun has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1935 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1986, when Sharday had 170 and Shaun had 2,108.

Side by side

  Sharday Shaun
Total US births 79773,610
Most in one year 1706,221
Babies in 2025 under 579
Estimated living today 78068,000
Median age today 3743
Peak year 19861978
Best rank 933rd girls52nd boys
Rank in 2025 unranked1,942nd
First recorded 19851935
Girls / boys 797 / 03,129 / 70,481

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 Shauns alive today are over 43; half the Shardays are over 37. That is 6 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 Sharday Shaun
England and Wales 776,311

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: Sharday and Shaun.