Maxwell
- Pronunciation
- [Max-well]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Capable
- Origin
- English
About the Name Maxwell
Maxwell is a Scottish surname meaning "Mac's well" or "Maccus's stream" — from the Old English/Norse personal name Maccus (a contraction of Magnus, "great") plus well (spring, stream, or pool). The surname appears in Scottish records continuously since at least the 12th century, and the Maxwell clan of southwestern Scotland traces to a 12th-century Saxon-influenced Scottish noble family.
The name's most consequential bearer is Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), whose four equations describing the relationship between electricity, magnetism, and light — "Maxwell's equations" — are one of the foundational achievements of 19th-century physics. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory unified previously separate fields of physics and laid the theoretical groundwork for Einstein's later relativity work. Albert Einstein called Maxwell's work "the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."
The name's American transition from surname to first name accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s, partly through celebrity adoption (Maxwell Drew Johnson, son of Jessica Simpson; Maxwell, the American R&B singer born Gerald Maxwell Rivera, 1973) and partly through the broader surname-as-given-name trend. Maxwell climbed from outside the US top 200 in 1990 to the top 100 boys' rank by 2010 and the top 75 by 2018. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the surname-style sophistication, the two-syllable strong-consonant structure, and the in-built scientific-intellectual register from the Maxwell-equations association. Common nicknames Max (now itself an enormously popular standalone name) and the rare Wells each carry distinct registers. International forms include the Italian Massimiliano (a separate but related name, from Latin Maximus), Maximilian (German/English), and Maximo (Spanish/Italian).
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Maxwell
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Maxwell by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2014 with 3,739 boys named Maxwell (boy rank #107 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #189 for boys (1,924 US births). That's 82 places below its 2014 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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Where in the US Is Maxwell Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Maxwell the strongest states are District of Columbia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | District of Columbia | #71 | 148 |
| 2 | New Hampshire | #80 | 171 |
| 3 | Massachusetts | #82 | 819 |
| 4 | Maine | #82 | 155 |
| 5 | Minnesota | #85 | 737 |
| 6 | Utah | #85 | 525 |
| 7 | Wisconsin | #90 | 684 |
| 8 | Vermont | #98 | 53 |
| 9 | Connecticut | #104 | 355 |
| 10 | Rhode Island | #108 | 105 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mississippi | #437 | 65 |
| 2 | Louisiana | #295 | 188 |
| 3 | Texas | #289 | 1,266 |
| 4 | Arkansas | #280 | 127 |
| 5 | South Carolina | #279 | 176 |
| 6 | New Mexico | #257 | 57 |
| 7 | Alabama | #246 | 219 |
| 8 | Oklahoma | #239 | 207 |
| 9 | Nevada | #229 | 140 |
| 10 | Florida | #218 | 892 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Maxwell in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Looking for names like Maxwell?
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 Maxwell to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Maxwell against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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