Holiday Calendar

National Sheila Day

Next celebratedTuesday, July 27, 2027

The word sheila may come from a holiday. Australia's national dictionary centre traces it to Shelah's Day, kept the day after St Patrick's - but National Sheila Day sits on July 27, and nothing explains why.

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJuly 27
OBSERVED INInternationally
CATEGORYNames
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

This name already had a day, and it falls in March.

No founder, proclamation, registration or sponsoring organisation could be found for the July 27 observance, and searches for one lead back to holiday listings rather than to any originating record. A listing site was already carrying the date by August 2022, which sets a floor on how long it has circulated rather than telling us when or why it began.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

Australians may owe the word sheila to a holiday

Ask the Australian National Dictionary Centre where the word sheila came from and the answer arrives hedged. The Centre records it entering Australian English in 1832, spelled shelah, and says it "probably derives from the generic use of the (originally Irish) proper name Sheila". For the rest, it points readers to "its likely origin in the old celebration Shelah's Day, celebrated the day after St Patrick's Day".

That is a holiday being offered as the source of an ordinary noun, rather than one word being traced to another. It is also a different holiday from this one. Shelah's Day falls on March 18, and the printed record of it runs back to at least 1819.

National Sheila Day sits on July 27 instead, and nothing found for it explains who chose that date. What the name does have is a long paper trail running either side of it.

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ORIGINS

Sheila Day history

CHAPTER 01

A saint stands behind the name, but not one called Sheila

Sheila is the anglicised form of the Irish Síle, and Síle is the Irish form of Cecilia, which comes in turn from the Latin Caecilia. The chain is short and well mapped.

What it does not contain is a Sheila. "While many Irish female names are saints' names, there is no Saint Sheila," writes Dymphna Lonergan of Flinders University, who gives the derivation as running from Cecily, the English form of the name of the virgin martyr St Cecilia. The Anglo-Normans carried the name into Ireland, where it became Síle.

CHAPTER 02

The day the record actually keeps

The Sheelah of March 18 is a folk figure rather than a canonised one. Sources reaching back two centuries call her Patrick's wife, or his mother, or his sister, or simply an acquaintance, and the older accounts are cheerfully unbothered by the disagreement.

What they agree on is the shape of the day. It ran on from St Patrick's Day, it involved whiskey, and the shamrock worn on the 17th was to be worn again on the 18th and then drowned in the last glass. In Newfoundland the day is recorded under that name from 1819 through to a newspaper report in 1989, and somewhere along the way the name attached itself to the weather.

CHAPTER 03

Which came first is still open

The Australian National Dictionary Centre points to the March holiday as the likely origin of the Australian noun. William Hone, writing in the 1820s, ran the sequence the other way, treating "Sheelah" as an Irish word already in use for a woman and suggesting the day had probably taken its name from that.

Lonergan's peer-reviewed article sets out to challenge the assumptions previously held about that link, and looks instead to the generic uses of Síle already present in the Irish language. Every party to this hedges, and none of them closes it.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Swift puts Sheelah in a poem

Jonathan Swift writes 'To Quilca, a country house in no very good repair', with the line 'In vain we make poor Sheelah toil'. Dymphna Lonergan reports it as the earliest use she has found.

Drinking on into the 18th

Anspach records that an Irishman may get drunk on the whole of March 17 'as well as the next day in honour of Sheelagh, Saint Patrick's wife', a passage the Dictionary of Newfoundland English still quotes.

A full account of Sheelah's Day

William Hone's Every-Day Book describes the March 18 festival, the whiskey, the shamrock, and the unsettled question of who Sheelah was supposed to be.

The word reaches Australia

The Australian National Dictionary Centre dates the first Australian appearance of the word to this year, spelled shelah, and used at first of a woman of Irish origin.

Two brushes, not one

England records that 'Newfoundland has two brushes, Patrick's and Sheila's', the local names for the storms around the two March days.

The link is challenged

Dymphna Lonergan's peer-reviewed article 'Sheila's Day: Memory or Myth?' investigates the link between the Australian word and the old holiday, and challenges previously held assumptions.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Sheila Day by the Numbers

197,031
Patricks in the 1901 census of Ireland, against 50 Sheelahs, 34 Sheilas, 25 Shelas, 14 Sheelaghs and 11 Sheelas
27 years
Gap at the start of the US national name file, 1880 to 1906, with no Sheila recorded in it
74,078
American girls named Sheila during the 1960s, ranking the name 59th for the decade
24 cm
Snow on the St John's area during a Sheila's Brush reported in 1989
65
American girls named Sheila in 2025
Its observers are not so anxious to determine who 'Sheelah' was, as they are earnest in her celebration.
William Honecompiler of The Every-Day Book, writing in the 1820s
as well as the next day in honour of Sheelagh, Saint Patrick's wife
Anspach, 1819quoted in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English

GOOD TO KNOW

National Sheila Day Around the World

Ireland

Hone printed what he could gather in the 1820s and then complained about it, regretting that few of the peculiarities of the festival familiar to Irishmen had been communicated to him.

Australia

What began as a label for one group of women broadened, from the late 19th century onward, into a general word for any woman or girl at all. That is the sense Australians still use.

Newfoundland

Here the name became weather. A fierce storm and heavy snowfall around March 18 is a sheila, or Sheila's Brush, and a 1923 account has the sealers waiting for it to pass before they started.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Sheila Day Matters

Etymology

A celebration credited with putting a common noun into a language.

Words are usually traced to other words. Here a national dictionary centre points instead at a celebration, putting a holiday rather than an older word at the head of the etymology. Whether the credit is deserved is exactly what specialists are still arguing about.

Disambiguation

Two days, one name, four months apart

Search for Sheila's Day and the results will mix a July name day with a March observance documented since 1819. They are not the same thing and no source connects them, but they collide constantly in search results, which is a good practical reason for this page to say which is which.

Evidence

A tidy story that the records refuse

The pairing of Paddy and Sheila as the archetypal Irish couple is repeated confidently in print. The Irish census returns do not support it, and the gap between the two is a useful reminder that a memorable explanation and a documented one are different things.

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Sheila Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Read the 1827 account for yourself

William Hone's Every-Day Book is out of copyright and scanned in full. Its entry for March 17 to 19 runs a few hundred words on Sheelah's Day and is more entertaining than any summary of it.

SETTLE

Settle which Sheila's Day someone means

If a friend wishes you a happy Sheila's Day in March, they are not early for this one. Knowing that the March day has its own two-hundred-year paper trail turns an easy mix-up into a decent story.

LOOK

Look the name up in a dictionary of English, not of names

Sheila has entries as a common noun in both Australian and Newfoundland English. Reading those entries side by side shows one name doing two completely different jobs in two hemispheres.

CHECK

Check where the name sits in the national record

The United States publishes its baby-name counts by year, free and complete. Sheila's line through them is easy to follow and takes about a minute to pull up.

ASK

Ask a Sheila what she was named after

The name has passed through a virgin martyr called Cecilia, an Irish anglicisation and at least one folk figure attached to St Patrick. Family answers rarely match the dictionary, which is the interesting part.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Sheila Day?

1 / 5

In Australian English, what does the word 'sheila' mean?

Answer

No. Dymphna Lonergan notes that while many Irish women's names are saints' names, this one is not, and traces it instead to the name of St Cecilia.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

8sources
6primary records
5independently dated
Primary records
Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National University
Meanings and origins of Australian words and idioms
The national authority on Australian English. Its entry for sheila dates the word's first Australian appearance to 1832 with the spelling shelah, traces its widening from women of Irish origin to any woman or girl, and names Shelah's Day as its likely origin while hedging that attribution.
View source
William Hone1827
The Every-Day Book and Table Book, volume II, entry for March 17 to 19
A first-hand English account of Sheelah's Day, covering the whiskey, the shamrock drowned in the last glass and the unresolved question of whether Sheelah was St Patrick's wife or his mother. Hone also derives the day's name from an existing Irish word rather than the reverse. Read here in the 1830 Tegg collected edition; the Dictionary of Newfoundland English dates the passage to 1827.
View source
Memorial University of Newfoundland1982
Dictionary of Newfoundland English, second edition, entry: sheila n
A scholarly dictionary carrying sheila as a Newfoundland common noun for a fierce storm around March 18, together with dated citations from 1819, 1829, 1872, 1923, 1924 and 1957 that document the observance and the folk identification of Sheila with St Patrick's wife or sister.
View source
Memorial University of Newfoundland1990
Dictionary of Newfoundland English, Supplement, entry: sheila n (supp)
The supplement's further citations for the same entry, including an 1872 St John's newspaper reference to Sheelah's day and a 1989 Evening Telegram report of the snowfall a Sheila's Brush delivered to the St John's area.
View source
Flinders University2019
Sheila's Day: Memory or Myth?
The institutional record and abstract of Dymphna Lonergan's peer-reviewed article in the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, volume 19 (2019). It states that there is no Saint Sheila, gives the derivation from Cecily and St Cecilia, and sets out that the article challenges previously held assumptions about the link between the Australian word and the March observance.
View source
US Social Security Administration
Top names of the 1960s
The agency's own published decade table, which ranks Sheila 59th among American girls' names for the 1960s with 74,078 births, and which was used to verify the national year-by-year name files this page's other counts come from.
View source
Additional coverage
Tinteán2021-07-10
What's in the name 'Sheila'? new research
Lonergan's own summary of her research for a general readership, supplying the 1901 Irish census returns for Patrick and the five Sheila spellings, the 1864 to 1900 civil birth registration counts, and her discovery of the name in Swift's 1725 poem about Quilca.
View source
Behind the Name
Meaning, origin and history of the name Sheila
A reference entry giving Sheila as the anglicised form of Irish Síle, which its linked entries in turn give as the Irish form of Cecilia and, behind that, the Latin Caecilia.
View source
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