Sharon

583,755 people in America carry this name — ranked #72 of 923.

A name with a settled sense and a settled sound.

Say it SHA ruhn

2 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

SH AE1 R AH0 N — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 583,755 2020 Census
  • Rank #72 Very common
  • Per 100,000 193.3 about 1 in 568 people
  • As a surname 3,258 ranked #9,543 the other way round

Where Sharon comes from and what it means

Reads literally as “his plain; his song”.

Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.

Sharon name popularity by year

725,167 babies were given this name since 1900. The busiest year was 1947, with 28,591 of them.

00 10 20 30 40 50s 60 70 80 90 00 10 20

Most people carrying it were born in the 1950s. It has been given less often of late.

Counted from Social Security card applications, so it covers births registered in the United States and leaves out names given to fewer than five babies in a year.

Middle names for Sharon

Two syllables sit with almost anything — the join matters more than the length.

Better avoided

  • Sharon Susan — same opening
  • Sharon Sarah — same opening
  • Sharon Nancy — runs together

Chosen by sound from the pronouncing dictionary, then ordered by how often the name is given. None of it is a rule — the ear decides.

A name from before the war

The year most children were called Sharon was 1947. Names of that age tend to come back once their owners are grandparents.

Is Sharon used for boys or for girls?

0.2% men
582,621 women

As recorded on census returns, not as anyone thinks the name ought to be used.

How Sharon is spelled

Sharon is how 66% of them spell it — 884,730 people answer to the sound.

Each spelling is its own census entry — the counts never overlap, so the shares are of the group, not of the country.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Who answers to it now

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 79.3%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 13.2%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 2.5%
  • Two or more races — 2.2%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 2.2%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.6%

Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.

The likeliest full names

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

Where the name Sharon is most common in the US

In the District of Columbia the name is given 2.3 times as often as it is across the country.

  • the District of Columbia ×2.3
  • Mississippi ×2.0
  • South Carolina ×1.9
  • Alabama ×1.8
  • Delaware ×1.7

Measured against the state's own share of births since 1960, so a small state can lead a big one. Counted from Social Security card applications.

Try it Birth Plan Worksheet

Tick what matters, print it, hand it over. Nothing is stored anywhere.

Open Birth Plan Worksheet on its own page

Where this page gets its numbers

  • Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
  • Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
  • Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.

Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers