Shane
Shane reached its high-water mark in 1973 at number 54, and has been recorded 196,166 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 635th. About 184,000 Shanes are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 38.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Shane boys named Shane
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 196,166
- Estimated living today
- 184,000
- Median age today
- 38
- Peak year
- 1973
- Best rank
- 54th
- Rank in 2025
- 635th
- First recorded
- 1933
- Girls / boys
- 3,583 / 192,583
How old the living Shanes are
born that year still alive today
Of the 196,166 babies given the name since 1933, about 184,000 are alive — 94 in every hundred. Roughly 20,000 of them are children and 2,500 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1987 and half after.
An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.
Where the name comes from
Origin Irish
Anglicized form of the Northern Irish pronunciation of Irish Seán, from Old French Jehan, from Latin Johannes, variant of Ioannes, from Koine Greek Ἰωάννης, from Hebrew יוֹחָנָן.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Shanes
- Shane Dawson (born 1988)American Internet personality
- Shane Long (born 1987)Irish association football player
- Shane Warne (1969–2022)Australian cricketer
- Shane Black (born 1961)American actor, screenwriter and film director
- Shane West (born 1978)American actor, musician and songwriter
- Shane Smeltz (born 1981)New Zealand footballer
- Shane McMahon (born 1970)American businessman and professional wrestler
- Shane Duffy (born 1992)Irish association football player
People named Shane with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Shane is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Shane is most concentrated in Hawaii (2.9×), Alaska (2.6×), Montana (2.6×), Wyoming (2.5×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1973
The most popular boys’ names the year Shane peaked:
Shane elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland boys | Shane | 22,075 | 5th |
| New Zealand boys | Shane | 10,213 | 12th |
| England and Wales boys | Shane | 6,761 | 74th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Shane | 1,075 | 45th |
| Scotland boys | Shane | 861 | 121st |
| France boys | Shane | 335 | 1,259th |
| Belgium boys | Shane | 282 | 329th |
| Switzerland boys | Shane | 205 | 412th |
| France girls | Shane | 135 | 2,093rd |
| England and Wales girls | Shane | 13 | 3,142nd |
| Poland boys | Shane | 5 birth registrations | 595th |
| Scotland girls | Shane | 3 | 508th |
Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.
Shane: births by region
| Region | Country | Spelling | Births | Share of the region | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| German boys | Switzerland | Shane | 190 | 0.015% | 313th |
| French boys | Switzerland | Shane | 11 | 0.003% | 573rd |
| Italian boys | Switzerland | Shane | 3 | 0.005% | 179th |
| Romansh boys | Switzerland | Shane | 1 | 0.027% | 6th |
Parts of a country counted above, not extra births. The share is what makes the regions comparable: they differ in size by a factor of three hundred.
By canton, Shane is most concentrated in Aargau, where 0.02% of children were given it – 25 of them.
Shane: rank by region
In 2019, Shane was given 5 times or more in 1 region of Belgium.
| Region | Spelling | Place | Children |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flanders | Shane | 842 | 5 |
Each of these is the top of a list the statistics office cut off somewhere – Belgium below 5 children – and published nothing after. So a region missing here is one where the name fell outside what was published, not one where it went unused. Places are shared where names tie, and the further down a list a place is, the more names can share it.
Shane among the living
How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland boys | Shane | 21 | 31 |
| Finland girls | Shane | — | 5 |
A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.
Related names
Shane against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.