Shay — #1156 US unisex name

What the Data Says About Shay

The Social Security Administration has registered 8,042 babies named Shay between 1953 and 2024, spanning 72 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Shay currently holds the #1156 rank among girls for 2024. The name reached its historical peak in 2022, when 301 babies received it in a single year. Shay is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 4,947 additional births since 1932.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Shay performed strongest in the 1990s, accumulating 1,449 births during that ten-year window. Across the 8 decades of recorded activity, Shay shows a stable profile with only moderate drift from its peak decade. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in California, which accounts for 862 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by Texas and Illinois. In total, SSA state-level files list Shay in 35 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Shay in our reference dataset. These figures derive from SSA's annual national and state-level name files, which include any name appearing at least five times in a given year or state-year; names below that threshold are suppressed for privacy and therefore excluded from the totals shown here. The 8,042 total represents a lower bound — actual usage may be higher in years or states where the count fell below the disclosure floor. This page is provided for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute personal, legal, or naming advice.