Shelest
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ʃələst/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Shelest is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Ukraine than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Transliteration of Ukrainian Шелест (Šelest), from шелест (šelest). Less commonly, a respelling of Polish Szelest, from szelest.
- UAUkraine≈1 in 5.2Kas Шелест(inferred from the name graph)
- RURussia≈1 in 30Kas Шелест
- PLPoland1 in 51K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Shelest itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Ukraine (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 130 (measured from records)
- 1 in 51K (inferred from the name graph)
≈8,400 named Шелест, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Poland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Шелест in UA Ukraine, RU Russia, BY Belarus and 1 more.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Transliteration of Ukrainian Шелест (Šelest), from шелест (šelest). Less commonly, a respelling of Polish Szelest, from szelest.
Sources 1
Attested across 10 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Shelest counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Shelest is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Russian, "rustle."
as a wordA Dictionary of Period Russian Names (Wickenden / Goldschmidt 1996)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Petro Shelestb. 1908RUUkrainian politician (1908-1996)
- Igor Shelestb. 1914RUSoviet test pilot and writer on aviation (1914-1992)
- Alla Shelestb. 1919RURussian ballet dancer (1919–1998)
- Yulii Shelestb. 1937UAUkrainian translator
- Vitalii Shelestb. 1940UAUkrainian Physicist
- Dmitry Shelestb. 1953UAUkrainian art historian
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 12 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 393 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 393 | #8,465 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 365 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 365 | #8,908 |
Reference works 1
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Shelest mean, and where does it come from?
- Transliteration of Ukrainian Шелест (Šelest), from шелест (šelest). Less commonly, a respelling of Polish Szelest, from szelest. Recorded by Wiktionary.
- How do you pronounce Shelest?
- A machine transcription gives /ʃələst/ (IPA) for Ukrainian.
- In which country does Shelest have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 8.4 thousand people named Шелест in Ukraine, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Shelest most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Shelest is densest in Poland — about 1 in 51 thousand people — even though Ukraine holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Shelest?
- In Poland, the national register counted 758 people named Shelest in 2026, about 1 in 51 thousand residents.
- How common is Shelest compared with other names?
- In Ukraine, Shelest is the 471st most common surname of 1,177,784 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Shelest?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/shelestThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Shelest” — the 471st most common surname in Ukraine. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.