9BabyNames Baby names with meanings & US popularity data

Cheyenne

Pronunciation
[Shy-ann]
Gender
Female
Meaning
An Algonquian Tribe Of The Great Plains. Capital City Of Wyoming.
Origin
French
Name of a Native American tribe. The Cheyennes were famous for their courage in battle, and the capital city of Wyoming is named after the tribe.

About the Name Cheyenne

Cheyenne descends from the Cheyenne Native American tribal name, ultimately from the Lakota Sioux Šahíyena meaning "red-talker" or "foreigner" (the Lakota Sioux name for the Cheyenne people). The name has been used as the namesake for the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming (the capital of Wyoming, founded 1867 as a stop on the Union Pacific Railroad).

Notable bearers include the iconic American Western-themed media of the 1950s and 1960s, including the long-running ABC Western series Cheyenne (1955–1962, starring Clint Walker as the wandering cowboy Cheyenne Bodie). Other notable bearers include American basketball player Cheyenne Trahan; contemporary American actress Cheyenne Jackson; and the iconic American Civil Rights leader Cheyenne Lee.

Cheyenne's American climb peaked in the 1990s, reaching the US top 100 girls' rank from 1993 through 2005. The name has been driven primarily by Native American naming heritage and the broader American taste for Native American-derived girls' names alongside Dakota and Sierra. The name has receded slightly since but remains in steady use, currently sitting in the US top 300 girls' rank. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the Native American heritage, the in-built American West cultural anchor, and the popular three-syllable -anne ending family (Cheyenne, Roxanne, Suzanne). Three flowing syllables, soft consonants, and tonal warmth distinctive to Native American-derived naming. The name reads as both classical-Native American and contemporary American. Common nicknames Shy (the dominant short form, casual and warm), Shey, Anne (back-end shortening), and the rare Chy each carry distinct registers; the alternate spellings Cheyenne, Shyann, and Cheyann have their own SSA tracking. International variants are minimal since the name's first-name use is essentially American; the original Lakota Sioux Šahíyena remains the etymological source.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.

Quick Facts About Cheyenne

1,414
French baby names in our dictionary
843
French female names
260
8-letter C-names in our dictionary
721
C-female names total
1994–2025
years of US SSA records (32 total)
60,632
total US births named Cheyenne (all years)

US Popularity History (1994–2025)

📉 Falling fast: Cheyenne dropped 341 places in the US girls ranking over the last 5 years (#579 in 2020 → #920 in 2025).

Annual US births named Cheyenne by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1996 with 4,866 girls named Cheyenne (girl rank #68 that year).

Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #920 for girls (285 US births). That's 852 places below its 1996 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.

Where in the US Is Cheyenne Most Popular?

Average girl-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 girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Cheyenne the strongest states are New Mexico, West Virginia, Idaho.

Strongest girls-name states

# State Avg rank Births
1 New Mexico #277 29
2 West Virginia #302 17
3 Idaho #355 23
4 Mississippi #359 44
5 Kentucky #380 108
6 Kansas #394 57
7 Arkansas #402 63
8 Oklahoma #420 101
9 Louisiana #430 93
10 North Carolina #457 236

Weakest girls-name states

# State Avg rank Births
1 Illinois #903 103
2 New York #755 113
3 New Jersey #719 52
4 Massachusetts #702 28
5 Michigan #661 105
6 California #660 434
7 Florida #637 275
8 Maryland #618 74
9 Pennsylvania #615 167
10 Ohio #606 180

Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Cheyenne in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.

Variant Forms

NameMeaningGenderOrigin
Cheyanna Variant Of Cheyanne - An Algonquian Tribe Of The Great Plains And Capital City Of Wyoming. Female French
Cheyanne Variant Of Cheyanne - An Algonquian Tribe Of The Great Plains And Capital City Of Wyoming. Female French
Chiana Variant Of Cheyanne - An Algonquian Tribe Of The Great Plains And Capital City Of Wyoming. Female French
Chianna Variant Of Cheyanne - An Algonquian Tribe Of The Great Plains And Capital City Of Wyoming. Female French
Chyanne Female English
Shayan Variant Of Shea Courteous. Male Irish
Shyann "Variant Of Shyanne, Cheyenne." Female English

Looking for names like Cheyenne?

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.

See all names like Cheyenne →

Compare Cheyenne to Other Popular Names

Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Cheyenne against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).

Cheyenne vs Olivia 210,124 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Emma 202,477 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Sophia 169,709 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Isabella 158,431 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Ava 157,356 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Charlotte 151,872 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Mia 149,779 births since 2014
Cheyenne vs Amelia 142,728 births since 2014
Compare to a different name →

Cheyenne Baby Name Ideas

Back Try Random Names