Shannice
Meaning of Shannice
Shannice, a feminine given name whose documented American usage coalesced in the late-twentieth-century naming milieu, is generally interpreted as a graphically embellished variant of Shanice— itself a creative blend built upon the Hebraic-Latin root of Janice (“God is gracious”) or, less commonly, upon the French-Greek stem of Denise (“follower of Dionysius”)—the reduplicated medial consonant in Shannice serving primarily to stabilize the long /iː/ vowel in English orthography. Sociolinguistic evidence situates the name’s ascent within African-American communities during the 1980s and early 1990s, an epoch in which R&B vocalist Shanice Wilson’s commercial visibility furnished a potent onomastic exemplar; nonetheless, national vital-statistics registers reveal that Shannice never surpassed nine recorded births in a single year, its highest placements occurring between 1988 and 1994 when it hovered in the lower eight-hundreds of the U.S. female name rankings. Consequently, Shannice occupies a liminal space between familiar and rare—anchored etymologically to venerable meanings of divine favor or cultured devotion, yet culturally marked by the stylistic experimentation characteristic of late-modern Anglo-American nomenclature.
Pronunciation
English
- Pronunced as shuh-NEES (/ʃəˈniːs/)
U.S. Popularity Chart
