Mamie
- Pronunciation
- [Ma-mie]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Abbreviation Of Mary And Miriam.
- Origin
- English
About the Name Mamie
Mamie is an affectionate diminutive form of Mary — and by extension its Hebrew cognate Miriam — following an old English nursery tradition of creating pet names through softened syllable reduplication. Mary itself traces to the Hebrew Miryam, a name of ancient origin whose precise meaning has been variously interpreted across centuries as "beloved," "bitter," or "wished-for child," with no scholarly consensus. The name Miriam appears in the Hebrew Bible as the prophetess and sister of Moses. As a diminutive, Mamie carries the warmth of the Mary tradition in a form that was distinctly familiar and affectionate — very much in the style of Victorian-era American nursery names that favored soft, doubled consonant sounds.
Mamie appears in the US Social Security top-1000 from 1880 and peaked in 1888 at rank #53, accumulating over 30,000 top-1000 births before fading from the charts in 1912. Its final top-1000 year at rank #95 with 1,273 births shows it was still a genuine presence in early-twentieth-century American naming.
Today Mamie reads as a warm, antique American feminine name with a pronounced Victorian-era charm. Its soft doubled syllables give it a gentle, musical quality that has attracted renewed interest in vintage name circles. The recorded variant Mayme represents a phonetic respelling of the same affectionate diminutive tradition.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Mamie
US Popularity History (1880–1912)
Annual US births named Mamie by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1900 with 1,337 girls named Mamie (girl rank #59 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1912, ranked #95 for girls (1,273 US births). That's 36 places below its 1900 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mayme | Abbreviation Of Mary And Miriam. | Female | English |
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Compare Mamie to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Mamie against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).