LaShawn is a 20th-century African American name combining the prefix La- with Shawn (from the Irish Seán / Hebrew Yochanan, "God is gracious"). A top-500 US baby name (girls) from 1972 to 1992. LaShawn Merritt (born 1986) — American sprinter; Olympic gold medalist (Beijing 2008, 400m); 2008 World Champion; 2009 World Championship gold (400m); 2013 World silver; one of the most-decorated American 400m runners of the 21st century; helped Team USA win 4x400m relay gold at the 2012 London Olympics. LaShawn Daniels (1977-2019) — American Grammy-winning songwriter; co-wrote Destiny's Child's "Say My Name" (Grammy for Best R&B Song 2001) and Whitney Houston's "It's Not Right but It's Okay" (Grammy 2000); collaborator with Beyoncé, Brandy, Toni Braxton, and Lady Gaga. LaShawn Ford — Illinois state representative. LaShawn Daniels — credited on more than 100 platinum records. *The name LaShawn — alongside Latoya, Lakeisha, Latasha, and Latonya — emerged from the 1970s post-Civil-Rights movement among African American families to create distinctive names that fused European-derived bases with West African phonetic patterns; the La- prefix evokes the Yoruba and Akan honorific structures. LaShawn Merritt* is unisex but predominantly feminine in 1980s-90s US naming.
Featured throughout late-20th-century African American culture and Olympic sports.
LaShawn does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of LaShawn reduce to 6, The Nurturer. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.