Cheryl
- Pronunciation
- [Che-ryl]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Feminine Form Of Charles
- Origin
- German
About the Name Cheryl
Cheryl is a modern English coinage that emerged in the twentieth century, and its recorded meaning — "feminine form of Charles" — reflects its association with the Germanic name Karl/Charles rather than an independent ancient etymology. Cheryl has no documented medieval or classical usage; it belongs to the same wave of inventive mid-century feminine names, built on existing sounds and associations, that gave American naming culture its distinctly mid-twentieth-century flavour.
Cheryl does not appear in the US Social Security top-1000 records before 1944, and it rose with remarkable speed to a peak of #13 in 1958 — a climb that neatly mirrors the postwar baby boom's appetite for fresh, modern-sounding names for girls. The name then began a steady retreat, last appearing in the top-1000 in 1979 at rank #94. Its concentrated chart life — roughly three and a half decades at meaningful frequency — makes it a defining marker of the 1950s and early 1960s generation.
Today Cheryl carries the warm, specific nostalgia of that era, evoking a generation of women who shaped American professional and cultural life in the latter twentieth century. The recorded variant is Sheryl, a spelling that softened the initial consonant without changing the pronunciation and achieved parallel popularity during the same period.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Cheryl
US Popularity History (1944–1979)
Annual US births named Cheryl by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1958 with 24,118 girls named Cheryl (girl rank #13 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1979, ranked #94 for girls (3,210 US births). That's 81 places below its 1958 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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Compare Cheryl to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Cheryl against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).