Shannon
Unisex name · Late 20th-century
- Living in the US
- ~328,800 survival-weighted estimate
- 2025 rank
- #2,387 among girls
- Births in 2025
- 116 348,161 since 1880
- Typical age
- 47 years, median
Shannon popularity over time
The high point was 1970: 16,118 births recorded as Shannon. The name does not appear in the data until 1881. It has held a top-100 place in 30 separate years.
As of 2025 the name sits at #2,387, with 116 births that year. The ten-year change is -65%. Year on year the rank dropped by 517.
How many people are named Shannon?
About 328,800 people named Shannon are alive in the United States today. That is out of 348,161 recorded births since 1880. The split is about 282,200 women and 46,600 men.
This is a survival-weighted estimate, not a headcount: every recorded birth year is multiplied by the chance someone born that year is still alive, using the SSA period life table. How the estimate works.
How old is the average Shannon?
The typical living Shannon is 47 years old. More of them were born in the 1970s than in any other decade. By the site’s era rules that makes Shannon a late 20th-century name.
Your Shannon
Is Shannon a boy's or a girl's name?
Shannon is genuinely unisex: over the last decade the split is close to even. Across the whole record, 85.0% of births under the name were girls. The name has changed sides: it began mostly on one sex and ends mostly on the other.
Shannon in England and Wales
ONS recorded 13 births named Shannon in 2025, ranking it #2,138.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Counts below three are suppressed by ONS.
Where the name Shannon comes from
English Wiktionary: given name from place names, surnames.
Notable people named Shannon
| Name | Known for | Years | Editions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shannon Lucid | American biochemist and retired NASA astronaut | 1943 | 44 | |
|
Shannon Elizabeth | American actress | 1973 | 43 |
| Shannon Leto | American drummer | 1970 | 36 | |
|
Shannon Walker | American scientist and NASA astronaut | 1965 | 34 |
|
Shannon Lee | American actress | 1969 | 34 |
|
Shannon Boxx | American soccer player | 1977 | 27 |
|
Shannon Miller | American artistic gymnast | 1977 | 27 |
|
Shannon Tweed | Canadian actress and model | 1957 | 25 |
Photo credits (6)
- Shannon Elizabeth — Super Festivals, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Shannon Walker — NASA/Norah Moran, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
- Shannon Lee — Brick Me Up Scottie, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Shannon Boxx — Ampatent, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Shannon Miller — Shannon Miller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
- Shannon Tweed — Glenn Francis, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The sharpest rise. Births under this name jumped from 4,615 in 1967 to 8,107 in 1968 — 1.8 times over in a single year.
Birth records contain the rise and nothing about its cause. This site does not supply one.
People and dates from Wikidata (CC0), limited to those with an English Wikipedia article who are known by this name as their first name.
Names similar to Shannon
Matched by sound and spelling inside this dataset, then ordered by total recorded births. This is not a claim about shared etymology.
Related pages
- All names from 1970
- Top names of 2025
- Names beginning with S
- Every year, 1880 to 2025
- Names by state
Get this data
Every number on this page is available as JSON:
/api/name/shannon.json.
Free to use with attribution (CC BY 4.0).