Maureen
- Pronunciation
- [Mau-reen]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Great
- Origin
- Celtic
About the Name Maureen
Maureen is an Anglicization of the Irish Mairin, itself a diminutive of Maire — the Irish form of Mary, which traces ultimately to the Hebrew Miriam. The Celtic meaning associated with the name cluster is great or exalted, though the Hebrew Miriam's own etymology is debated. The Irish diminutive suffix -in (rendered as -een in English phonetics) adds an affectionate quality to the name, giving Maureen the warmth of a pet form while functioning fully as a formal given name. Its Celtic origin places it in a family of Irish-influenced names that gained significant traction in mid-century American naming as Irish-American communities grew in cultural visibility.
Notable bearers include Maureen Dowd, an American op-ed columnist and author born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of five children of an Irish-Catholic police inspector at the United States Capitol, and Maureen Stapleton, an American actress of stage and screen born Lois Maureen Stapleton on June 21, 1925, in Troy, New York, who died on March 13, 2006, in Lenox, Massachusetts — known for her work across decades of American theater and film.
In US Social Security records, Maureen first entered the female top-1000 in 1946 and reached its peak of #88 in 1948. It held steady near that level through the early 1950s before leaving the top-1000 after 1955, accumulating 40,576 top-1000 births across its decade-long run. Recorded variants include Maura, Mavra, Mo, and Moira — spanning from the more formal Maura to the stripped-down single-syllable Mo, with Moira representing a parallel Irish anglicization that stands as a cognate rather than a true variant.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Maureen
US Popularity History (1946–1955)
Annual US births named Maureen by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1954 with 4,369 girls named Maureen (girl rank #97 that year).
Where it stands today: in 1955, ranked #100 for girls (4,339 US births). That's 3 places below its 1954 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
Famous People Named Maureen
2 notable figures from history and culture who share the name Maureen.
- Maureen Dowd is a well known American columnist and best-selling author.
- Maureen Stapleton was a renowned actress of America.
Looking for names like Maureen?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Maureen to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Maureen against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).