Stephaine
Feminine · “a crown”
Stephaine is Stephanie with two letters changed places. It is one of the commonest transpositions in American name records, and it has been written often enough, by enough different families, over enough decades, to have earned a chart line of its own.
How old is the name Stephaine?
Stephaine first appears in US birth records in 1949 — 76 years ago. The typical Stephaine alive today was born around 1981, making them about 44 years old. About 4,000 people named Stephaine are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Stephaine most popular?
Stephaine peaked in 1983, reaching #797 nationally. See the whole 1983 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From Stephanos to Stephaine
The story of Stephaine
Stephanie came into English from the French Stephanie, itself the feminine of Etienne, and spread across the English-speaking world in the twentieth century. Stephaine is its shadow: not a French, Greek or English form, but a rearrangement that arrived alongside the name and stayed. What makes it look plausible is an accident of French spelling. French genuinely does have an -aine ending, in Germaine, Lorraine and Fontaine, so a reader who does not know the original often takes Stephaine for a legitimate variant rather than a slip of the pen, and copies it forward.
Meaning
a crown
The name behind it is the Greek Stephanos. Swapping two letters changes nothing about what the name means.
How the name formed
- Stephanos
- Stephanie
- Stephaine
Related forms: Stephanie · Stephanie · Estefania
Pronouncing Stephaine
STEF-uh-nee
Almost everyone says it exactly as Stephanie. Read strictly, the spelling would give stef-AYN, and a small number of Stephaines use that and correct everybody.
Nicknames for Stephaine
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
- 1949
- Most girls named
- 1983195 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #797reached in 1983
- Change vs 2014
- 0.0%5 in 2019, from 5
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.
Stephaine in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Stephanie in English — spelling variant
- Stephanie in French — related form
- Estefania in Spanish — related form
Stephaines among us
people named Stephaine are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Stephaine sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- Spoken aloud it is a familiar name and needs no explanation at all.
- Steph works as a short form and sidesteps the spelling completely.
- It has a long enough run in American records to read as established rather than novel.
- Every form, teacher and autocorrect will silently repair it to Stephanie.
- It has no history apart from Stephanie's; the difference is a swapped pair of letters, not a tradition.
- A Stephaine spells the name out letter by letter, every time, for life.
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Stephaine
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Stephaines are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 4,000 people named Stephaine are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Stephaine in 2025?
- Stephaine is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Stephaine with classmates?
- Stephaine will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More S names
The most-given names starting with S, all years combined.
Susan#1085 · Sarah#90 · Sandra#1207 · Stephanie#557 · Sharon#1250 · Shirley#1581 · Samantha#151 · Sophia#5
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Stephaine? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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