Sheldon
The boy's name Sheldon has been in the national records since 1881, with 37,172 births to its name. In 2025 it ranked 2,765th. About 24,000 Sheldons are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 44.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Sheldon boys named Sheldon
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 37,172
- Estimated living today
- 24,000
- Median age today
- 44
- Peak year
- 1992
- Best rank
- 380th
- Rank in 2025
- 2,765th
- First recorded
- 1881
- Girls / boys
- 496 / 36,676
How old the living Sheldons are
born that year still alive today
Of the 37,172 babies given the name since 1881, about 24,000 are alive — 65 in every hundred. Roughly 2,400 of them are children and 5,400 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 1981 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
From Old English scylf (“shelf”) + dūn (“hill”) or denu (“valley”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Sheldons
- Sheldon Glashow (born 1932)American theoretical physicist
- Sheldon Adelson (1933–2021)American businessman
- Sheldon Whitehouse (born 1955)American lawyer and politician
- Sheldon Riley (born 1999)Australian singer
- Sheldon Leonard (1907–1997)American actor, producer, director, and writer
- Sheldon Lewis (1869–1958)American actor
- Sheldon Brown (1944–2008)American cyclist, writer and mechanic
- Sheldon Lettich (born 1951)American film director, producer and screenwriter
People named Sheldon with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Sheldon is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Sheldon is most concentrated in Hawaii (5.5×), New York (2.6×), Utah (2.4×), North Dakota (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 1992
The most popular boys’ names the year Sheldon peaked:
Sheldon elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales boys | Sheldon | 597 | 402nd |
| France boys | Sheldon | 545 | 1,031st |
| England and Wales girls | Sheldon | 35 | 2,165th |
| Belgium boys | Sheldon | 10 | 1,382nd |
| France girls | Sheldon | 5 | 5,835th |
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.
Related names
Sheldon 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.