Shasta
Feminine
Shasta is overwhelmingly a girls’ name — 4,320 girls against 20 boys since 1880.
Shasta is a mountain in northern California, tall enough to be visible for a hundred miles and named for the people who lived beneath it. It is also, in the United States, a supermarket soda — the two have shared the word since the nineteen-thirties, and which one a listener thinks of first says a good deal about where they grew up.
How old is the name Shasta?
Shasta first appears in US birth records in 1926 — 99 years ago. The typical Shasta alive today was born around 1984, making them about 41 years old. About 4,200 people named Shasta are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Shasta most popular?
Shasta peaked in 1978, reaching #698 nationally. Today it ranks #14942, 14,244 places below that high. See the whole 1978 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
Origin, sound and short forms
The story of Shasta
American naming has taken mountains for daughters as readily as rivers and states — Sierra, Shasta, Denali, Cheyenne — and the practice is old enough to count as a tradition. Shasta appears in the records from the nineteen-twenties, well before the soft drink existed, so the mountain came first for the name as it did for the map. The beverage company took its name from a spring in the same region and, by advertising heavily for decades, attached the word to something considerably smaller than a volcano. Both associations are now permanent.
Meaningscholars disagree
Not established
The name belongs to the Shasta people, whose territory covered the region, and it comes into English through them. What the word meant in their own language, or whether the English form is even close to what they called themselves, is not securely known — the name reached maps through nineteenth-century travelers and trappers, and several competing origins have been proposed since, including a Russian one. The mountain and the people share the name and the trail stops there.
Pronouncing Shasta
SHAS-tuh
SHAS-tuh, two syllables, stress at the front, the first vowel short as in cast. There is no competing reading, and the spelling has never varied — one of the advantages of a name taken from a map.
Nicknames for Shasta
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1926
- Most girls named
- 1979235 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #698reached in 1978
- Change vs 2023
- −37.5%5 in 2025, from 8
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Shastas among us
people named Shasta are estimated to be alive in the US today
About 1 girl in 321,453 born in 2025 was named Shasta
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
What happens to a name after it peaks
The Edie test
Every popular name lives one long story — a climb, a peak, a slow settling back. Shasta's later chapters haven't been written yet, so we borrowed them: Edie climbed just as high around 1963, and its whole arc is on record. Line the two peaks up, and Edie's path sketches the road Shasta is walking now.
Shasta sits in the calm middle of the cycle — neither chasing a wave nor sliding off one. Middle-of-the-cycle names age slowly and predictably.
A scored estimate from 146 years of naming cycles — not a prophecy. Great names outlive statistics. How this is scored
Shasta beside its neighbors
The names ranked closest to Shasta in 2025, in babies rather than position — the bars are to scale.
US girls given each name in 2025.
The trade-off
- It names a real and striking place, and the reference is unmistakable in the West.
- The spelling is fixed and phonetic, so the name is written correctly from hearing it.
- It goes to girls and boys both, as place names generally do.
- Outside the West the soft drink is the first association for many Americans, and it arrives before the mountain.
- The name belongs to a Native people, and using it is a choice worth making deliberately rather than by default.
- Its origin genuinely stops at the people who bore it first, so a meaning is not available to hand over.
Nobody names a baby alone.
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What they receive
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Shasta
Feminine · #14942 in the U.S.
Frequently asked
- How many Shastas are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 4,200 people named Shasta are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Shasta in 2025?
- Shasta ranks #14942 among US girl names in 2025, with 5 babies given the name.
- How rare is the name Shasta?
- About 1 in every 321,453 US girls born in 2025 was named Shasta — 5 in all.
- Will my child share the name Shasta with classmates?
- Shasta will almost certainly be the only one in school.
Ranked beside Shasta
Names sitting at a similar level of popularity right now.
Loghan#14942 · Braxton#14942 · Airiana#14942 · Zykeria#14942 · Makyah#14942 · Sophya#14942 · Lyllian#14942 · Sarrah#14942
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Shasta? See the current top 100.
Choosing between Shasta and another name?
See them side by side — full stats, history and a gentle verdict.
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Cast your vote
Which one would you pick?
Your gut first, the numbers after — the split shows once you pick.
US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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