as a First Name
Transferred use of the surname, in origin a local name from any of the various places (in the West Midlands, Derbyshire, Hampshire, and Surrey) named in Old English from scīr ‘county, shire’ or scīr ‘bright’ + lēah ‘wood, clearing’. It was given by Charlotte Brontë to the heroine of her novel Shirley (1849). According to the novel, her parents had selected the name in prospect of a male child and used it regardless. Shirley had earlier been used as a boy's name (Charlotte Brontë refers to it as a ‘masculine cognomen’), but this literary influence fixed it firmly as a girl's name. It was strongly reinforced during the 1930s and 40s by the popularity of the child film star Shirley Temple (b. 1928).
| 75th in the U.S. for 2011 |
Nicknames & variations
Quick facts
- Hundreds of thousands
- of people in the U.S have this name
- 582,505
- to be exact (as of February 2011)
- 685,367
- if you include dead people (since the government started keeping track)
- Mississippi
- has the most people named Shirley per capita
- 1935
- marked the height of its popularity
99.41%
0.59%
84%
55+
55+
14%
30-54
30-54
1%
13-29
13-29
0.76%
0-12
0-12
Top state populations
U.S. Distribution Map
Top Twitterers with this name
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