Shay
The girl's name Shay has been in the national records since 1932, with 13,251 births to its name. It is given to both boys and girls. In 2025 it ranked 1,225th. About 13,000 Shays are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 26.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Shay boys named Shay
Girls and boys called Shay
years more girls than boys years more boys than girls
Both, throughout, without either side ever taking it over: 8,227 girls and 5,024 boys in all, and in 2025 the split was 184 to 77.
The girls’ share of each year’s babies of the name, in the 65 years in which at least 25 babies got it. The line touches the middle more often than there are crossings marked: a year or two on the other side is not a name changing hands, and only a move that holds for 5 counted years and reaches 60/40 is recorded as one. All 581 names that changed sex.
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 13,251
- Estimated living today
- 13,000
- Median age today
- 26
- Peak year
- 2022
- Best rank
- 910th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,225th
- First recorded
- 1932
- Girls / boys
- 8,227 / 5,024
How old the living Shays are
born that year still alive today
Of the 13,251 babies given the name since 1932, about 13,000 are alive — 97 in every hundred. Roughly 4,600 of them are children and 70 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1999 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 a surname
Variant of Shea, from Irish Ó Séaghdha.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Shays
- Shay Mitchell (born 1987)Canadian actress
- Shay Given (born 1976)Irish association football player
- Shay Brennan (1937–2000)Irish footballer
- Shay Astar (born 1981)American actress, singer-songwriter
- Shay Jordan (born 1985)American pornographic actress
- Shay Facey (born 1995)English association football player
People named Shay with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Shay is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Shay is most concentrated in Utah (4.4×), California (2.3×), Texas (1.8×), Washington (1.6×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2022
The most popular girls’ names the year Shay peaked:
Shay elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Shay | 5,238 | 164th |
| Ireland boys | Shay | 2,021 | 39th |
| Scotland boys | Shay | 919 | 96th |
| Northern Ireland boys | Shay | 541 | 93rd |
| England and Wales girls | Shay | 375 | 1,371st |
| France boys | Shay | 165 | 2,101st |
| France girls | Shay | 35 | 7,465th |
| Scotland girls | Shay | 17 | 537th |
| Ireland girls | Shay | 3 | 905th |
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.
Shay 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 | Shay | 6 | 9 |
| Finland girls | Shay | — | 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
Shay 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.