Maxine
Meaning
greatest (feminine of Max); famously borne by Maxine Hong Kingston, Chinese-American memoirist known for The Woman Warrior
Goes by Max, Maxie
The story
Maxine is the feminine of Max, ultimately from the Latin Maximus, greatest, a superlative dressed up in a soft ending. It has an unmistakably vintage American shape: the records show it rising fast in the early twentieth century, peaking in the decades around the 1920s and 1930s, then sliding slowly for two generations, and now, like Hazel and Mabel before it, turning back upward in the 2010s and 2020s. Somewhere in the middle of that arc came its most important literary bearer. Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior in 1976, weaving memoir together with Chinese myth so seamlessly that the book seemed to invent its own genre, and her China Men won the National Book Award. Her work carried the name into every American literature syllabus. Maxine now sits in a sweet spot: grandmother-chic, literary, and rising again.
Maxine around the world
One shared root links 6 names across 4 languages.
Shared root: from Latin maximus "greatest", via the Roman name Maximilianus (a derivative of Maximus borne by a 3rd-century saint); the tale that it was coined for the Habsburg heir from Maximus + Aemilianus is legend; Max is the shared short form
The constellation
More branches
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Maxine peaked in the 1910s and the 1930s in nearly equal measure.
See popularity in Brazil
Popularity in Brazil
162 people · the #29,495 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 1,000,000 · median age 27
Among people named Maxine living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1990s than in any other decade.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
The Maxine deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Maxine 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 Maxine fits with your family’s names and surname.
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