Shire
surname · Latin script
Meaning: perhaps ‘dweller at the meeting-place of the shire’, OE scīr; first attested Walter de Schyre 1296 SRSx
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ʃaja/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Shire is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Somalia than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 145K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 202K
- SOSomalia≈1 in 6.1K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Somalia (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 235 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 6.1K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,900 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Somalia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
perhaps ‘dweller at the meeting-place of the shire’, OE scīr; first attested Walter de Schyre 1296 SRSx
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Shire 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SO Somalia | ≈1,900 est. | ≈1 in 6.1K | 21 | — | 14 |
| US United States | 1,643 | 1 in 202K | 1.6K | Shire | 235 |
| KE Kenya | ≈800 est. | ≈1 in 67K | — | Shire | 11 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈450 est. | ≈1 in 145K | 725 | Shire | 100 |
| SE Sweden | 345 | 1 in 30K | 345 | — | 14 |
| NO Norway | 302 | 1 in 18K | 302 | — | 10 |
| FI Finland | 66 | 1 in 84K | 66 | — | 2 |
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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Puntland PEC/TPEC local-council candidate lists. 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)
Shire is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, An administrative area or district between about the 5th to the 11th century, subdivided into hundreds or wapentakes and jointly governed by an ealdorman and a sheriff; also, a present-day area corresponding to such a historical district; a county; especially (England), a county having a name ending in -shire.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, river, Malawi, Mozambique
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Irish, A Palatine name in Co. Limerick. Formerly Shier, a form still in use there
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
In enm, alternative form of schire (“shire, county”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Nyanja, Shire (a river in Malawi)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Helena Mennie Shireb. 1912GBBritish literary historian (1912-1991)
- David Shireb. 1937USAmerican songwriter
- Talia Shireb. 1946USAmerican actress
- Peter Shireb. 1947USAmerican artist (born 1947)
- Karen Shireb. 1959USAmerican sociologist
- Hassan Khalif Shire Alib. 1988AUAustralian murderer and terrorist
- George Shireb. 2000GBZimbabwean academic
- Tristan Shireactor
- Katy A ShireGBresearcher
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 34 sources across 19 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.6K | #17,239 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.5K | #18,123 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.1K | #22,098 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 725 | #8,523 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 345 | #2,597 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 302 | #5,063 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 66 | #17,935 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Sukunimitilasto (Finnish surnames register) | — | 43 | — |
| SO Somalia | Puntland PEC/TPEC local-council candidate lists | 2023 | 21 | #33 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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
- How do you pronounce Shire?
- A machine transcription gives /ʃaja/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Shire mean, and where does it come from?
- perhaps ‘dweller at the meeting-place of the shire’, OE scīr; first attested Walter de Schyre 1296 SRSx Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- In which country does Shire have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.9 thousand people named Shire in Somalia, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Shire?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,643 people named Shire in 2010, about 1 in 202 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Shire?
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/shireThe 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, “Shire”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.