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Wikipedia / Sharon

Sharon ( 'plain'), also spelled Saron, is a given name as well as a Hebrew name.

In English-speaking areas, Sharon is now predominantly a feminine given name, but historically it was also used as a masculine given name. In Israel, it is used as both.

Etymology

The Hebrew word שָׁרוֹן šārôn simply means "plain", as in a flat area of land. But in the Hebrew Bible, שָׁרוֹן Šārôn is the name specifically given to the fertile plain between the Samarian Hills and the coast, known (tautologically) as Sharon plain in English. The further etymology is difficult.

The phrase "rose of Sharon" (חבצלת השרון ḥăḇaṣṣeleṯ ha-sharon) occurs in the KJV translation of the Song of Songs ("I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley"), and has since been used in reference to a number of flowering plants.

Unlike other unisex names that have come to be used almost exclusively as feminine (e.g. Evelyn), Sharon was never predominantly a masculine name. Usage before 1925 is very rare and was apparently inspired either by the Biblical toponym or one of the numerous places in the United States named after the Biblical plain.

Usage history

Use as a feminine name began in the early 20th century, first entering the statistics of the 1,000 most common given names in the United States in 1925. Its inspiration was possibly the heroine of Adela Rogers St. Johns's serial novel The Skyrocket, published in 1925 and made into a romantic drama film starring Peggy Hopkins Joyce in 1926.

The name's popularity in the U.S. steeply increased in the mid-1930s. Sharon peaked during the 1940s and remained a top-10 name for most of that decade. The variant Sharron is on record from the 1930s to the 1970s. Its peak popularity in the U.S. was in 1943. The more eccentric spelling Sharyn was popular for a brief time in the 1940s and peaked in 1945.

The name's popularity has steadily declined since the 1940s, except for a slight rise in the late 1950s. It fell out of the top 100 after 1977, out of the top 500 after 2001, and out of the top 1,000 names for American girls after 2016.

In the United Kingdom, its popularity peaked during the 1960s. It was the 10th most popular female name by 1964 and was still as high as 17th in 1974 (when it was 70th in the U.S.), but a sharp decline in popularity followed. Since the 1980s, the name has not been in the top 100. Names that rhyme with Sharon, such as Darren and Karen, were also popular in the Anglosphere during the same period.

In the 1980s, Sharon was stereotyped as a "chav" name in the United Kingdom, signifying a working-class teenage girl who works in a supermarket. By the 2010s, the name had become associated with memes poking fun at overbearing middle-agedd women who complain to authority figures. The demeaning stereotype has been attributed to sexism and age discrimination and caused difficulty for women named Sharon.

While appearing on the BBC's Celebrity Mastermind, contestant Amanda Henderson was asked to name the Swedish teenage climate activist who wrote a book titled No One's Too Small to Make a Difference. Henderson answered, "Sharon". After the broadcast, climate activist Greta Thunberg (the correct response to the question) changed her name to Sharon on her Twitter bio (which remained there for the day: 3 January 2020).

People with the given name

Feminine given name

Masculine given name

People with the surname

Sharon was adopted as a surname by Zionist emigrants in the context of the Hebrew revival in the early 20th century, and has since become a heritable Israeli surname.

  • Arieh Sharon (born Ludwig Kurzmann, 1900–1984), Israeli architect

  • Ariel Sharon (born Ariel Scheinermann, 1928–2014), Israeli prime minister. David Ben-Gurion gave him the surname "Sharon" in c. 1948.

  • Avraham Sharon (born Abraham Schwadron, 1878–1957), Israeli intellectual

  • Carma Sharon, Australian actress, director, and producer

  • Moshe Sharon (born 1937), Israeli scholar of Islamic history and civilization, author i.a. of the Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, a work in progress planned to contain all ancient Arabic inscriptions found in the Holy Land

  • Omri Sharon (born 1964), Israeli politician, son of Ariel Sharon

  • Revital Sharon (born 1970), Israeli Olympic artistic gymnast

  • Tomer Sharon (born 1970), Israeli actor, stand-up comedian and singer

  • Yuval Sharon, American stage director

Pseudonym

  • Deke Sharon, stage name of Kurk Richard Toohey (born 1967), American singer, musician, producer

Fictional characters

See also

Placenames

References