Shawn
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- From The Shady Grove
- Origin
- English
About the Name Shawn
Shawn is a modern Anglicized spelling variant of Sean, the Irish form of John (see separate entry on John for the Hebrew Yochanan etymology meaning "Yahweh is gracious"). The Sh-spelling Shawn is essentially a 20th-century American invention, distinguishing the spelling from the historically Irish Sean.
The various spellings (Shawn, Sean, Shaun, Shaughn) are tracked separately by SSA and represent the same underlying Irish name. The Shawn spelling has been the most-popular American variant. Notable bearers include American basketball star Shawn Kemp (born 1969, the iconic American NBA Hall of Famer of the 1990s); American singer Shawn Mendes (using the Shawn spelling, born 1998, the Canadian-American singer-songwriter who anchored the name in 2010s and 2020s American teen popular culture); the iconic American filmmaker Shawn Levy (using Levy as a surname, born 1968, the Canadian filmmaker of Night at the Museum and Netflix's Stranger Things); and contemporary American basketball player Shawn Marion.
Shawn held a US top-50 boys' rank from 1968 through 1990 — over two decades of consistent American popularity, peaking around 1980 at #20 in the United States. The name has receded since but remains in steady use, currently sitting in the US top 300 boys' rank. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the layered Hebrew-Irish-Anglicized pedigree, the in-built John-biblical religious anchor, and the popular one-syllable Sh-W-N structure. The name reads as both classical-Irish and contemporary American with the strong Shawn Mendes contemporary music cultural anchor. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — the rare Shawnie and Shawn-bear each occasionally appear; the alternate spellings Sean (the Irish original), Shawn, Shaun, and Shaughn have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Sean (Irish original), Seán (Irish original with accent), Shane (alternate Irish), John (English), Juan (Spanish), Giovanni (Italian), and the broader John/Yochanan family.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Shawn
US Popularity History (1964–2025)
Annual US births named Shawn by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1971 with 12,825 boys named Shawn (boy rank #28 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #682 for boys (399 US births). That's 654 places below its 1971 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Shawn Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Shawn the strongest states are Delaware, New Hampshire, Hawaii.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Delaware | #165 | 23 |
| 2 | New Hampshire | #255 | 15 |
| 3 | Hawaii | #255 | 18 |
| 4 | West Virginia | #326 | 20 |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | #333 | 331 |
| 6 | Maryland | #355 | 152 |
| 7 | New Mexico | #385 | 18 |
| 8 | Ohio | #398 | 276 |
| 9 | Connecticut | #399 | 47 |
| 10 | Iowa | #413 | 65 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tennessee | #735 | 77 |
| 2 | Colorado | #645 | 62 |
| 3 | Washington | #607 | 91 |
| 4 | Utah | #602 | 36 |
| 5 | Texas | #586 | 472 |
| 6 | Illinois | #585 | 174 |
| 7 | Arizona | #581 | 112 |
| 8 | Minnesota | #568 | 81 |
| 9 | Oregon | #553 | 36 |
| 10 | North Carolina | #548 | 183 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Shawn in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shaun | Variant Of John From Sean. | Male | Irish |
Looking for names like Shawn?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Shawn to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Shawn against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).