Sheila
- Pronunciation
- [Shei-la]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Irish Form Of Cecilia Blind
- Origin
- Irish
About the Name Sheila
Sheila is the Irish anglicization of Síle, itself the Irish form of Cecilia, the Latin name derived from the Roman family name Caecilius. The Latin root is traditionally associated with caecus, meaning "blind," though scholars have debated this derivation. Whatever the precise Latin etymology, Sheila arrived in English through centuries of Irish oral tradition in which Síle was one of the standard and much-loved feminine names of Gaelic Ireland, used widely from the medieval period onward. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the anglicized form Sheila had spread far beyond Ireland to Australia, Britain, and North America, where it became instantly recognizable as a name with a distinctly Irish-Celtic spirit and lyrical quality.
Sheila first entered the US Social Security top-1000 in 1942 and climbed swiftly through the baby-boom years to its peak in 1963 at rank #50, accumulating nearly 188,000 top-1000 births across its chart run — a very strong total. The name last appeared in the top-1000 in 2007 at rank #990, completing a 65-year run.
Sheila retains an easy, musical quality — two clear syllables with a bright open ending — that gives it enduring appeal. Recorded variants include the historically consistent Sheilah and the more phonetically modern Shila and Shyla.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Sheila
US Popularity History (1942–2007)
Annual US births named Sheila by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1962 with 8,777 girls named Sheila (girl rank #52 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2007, ranked #990 for girls (271 US births). That's 938 places below its 1962 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.
Paste the snippet below on any HTML page. Includes a credit link back to 9BabyNames — please keep it intact.
Variant Forms
Looking for names like Sheila?
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 Sheila to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Sheila against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).