Maggie
Meaning
pet form of Margaret, "pearl"
Famously borne by Maggie Cheung Man-yuk, who paired it with her formal Cantonese name.
The story
Maggie is Margaret worn in soft shoes. Margaret comes from the Greek margarites, "pearl," and Maggie is its warmest short form, a name that has been busy for well over a century: more than 11,000 babies in the 1920s. It thinned in the mid-century, when formal Margaret itself went quiet, and then did what its parent name could not, coming back on its own terms as a first name in full, 16,919 in the 2000s and about 6,400 so far this decade. It is a girl's name that reads friendly before it reads anything else, equally at home on a child, a farm dog, and a Rod Stewart song. The pearl is still in there, but nobody reaching for Maggie is thinking of jewels; they are thinking of someone easy to like.
The formal names behind Maggie
Maggie is an established short form of each of these names.
Margaret · Greek origin · pearl
Margarita · Spanish origin · variant of Margaret, pearl
Magnolia · Latin origin · magnolia tree
Maggie around the world
One shared root links 17 names across 7 languages.
Shared root: from Greek margarites "pearl", by way of Latin Margarita
The constellation
13 more branches of this family
Maggie in song
Maggie May
Rod Stewart (1971)
A boy tangled up with an older woman, mandolin and all, released as a B-side until radio flipped the record over and made it a number one.
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Maggie peaked in the 1890s and the 2020s in nearly equal measure.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
138 people · the #32,928 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 1,000,000 · median age 8
Among people named Maggie living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 2010s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 41 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
When you meet Maggie
Most people given the name Maggie in the United States are teenagers or young adults today.
Estimated from US Social Security birth registrations and typical lifespans; a rough guide, not a rule.
The Maggie deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Maggie truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Maggie fits with your family’s names and surname.
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