Meaning and history
From an English surname originally taken from a place name meaning “clearing on a bank” in Old English, Shelley is associated with two notable surname bearers: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), the Romantic poet whose works include Adonais and Ozymandias, and his wife Mary Shelley (1797–1851), author of the horror novel Frankenstein. It became widely used as a feminine given name after the 1940s.
20062006: 40 births, rank #3,795
2007: 35 births, rank #4,299
2008: 36 births, rank #4,268
2009: 30 births, rank #4,805
2010: 28 births, rank #4,974
20112011: 26 births, rank #5,207
2012: 17 births, rank #7,144
2013: 16 births, rank #7,372
2014: 21 births, rank #5,993
2015: 13 births, rank #8,447
20162016: 17 births, rank #6,901
2017: 12 births, rank #8,776
2018: 12 births, rank #8,617
2019: 12 births, rank #8,597
2020: 15 births, rank #7,212
20212021: 11 births, rank #8,978
2022: 7 births, rank #12,243
2023: 9 births, rank #10,312
2024: 11 births, rank #8,946
20252025: 13 births, rank #7,885
Shelley moved from #776 to #872 for girls between 1992 and 1993. Its highest annual birth count came in 1964, with 2,821 births.