Monique
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Wise
- Origin
- French
About the Name Monique
Monique is the French form of Monica, carrying the meaning wise — though Monica's own etymology is uncertain, with proposals including a connection to the Latin moneo (to advise, to warn) as well as a possible North African Berber or Phoenician origin, reflecting the historical fact that the most famous bearer, Saint Monica of Hippo, was North African. The French form Monique, with its characteristic -ique ending, gives the name a distinctly Gallic elegance that distinguished it from the plainer English Monica in American naming use. It carries both the saint's heritage — Monica was the mother of Saint Augustine and a symbol of patient, prayerful devotion — and the fashionable French surface that appealed to late-twentieth-century American parents.
Monique Truong is a Vietnamese-American novelist and essayist born in Saigon in 1968, who fled with her family to the United States in 1975 as part of the post-war exodus from Vietnam and grew up in Boyce, Virginia — a writer whose work in fiction and essays has made her a significant voice in Vietnamese-American literature.
In US Social Security records, Monique first entered the female top-1000 in 1980, immediately reaching its peak rank of #93 that year before beginning a gradual, decades-long decline. It maintained a presence through 2008 — its final year in the top-1000 at #923 — accumulating 8,500 top-1000 births across its nearly three-decade run. The neighboring years of 2007 (#773) and 2006 (#656) trace the slow, consistent fade typical of French-inflected names that peaked in the 1980s.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Monique
US Popularity History (1980–2008)
Annual US births named Monique by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 1980 with 3,163 girls named Monique (girl rank #93 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2008, ranked #923 for girls (297 US births). That's 830 places below its 1980 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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Famous People Named Monique
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Monique.
- Monique Truong is a distinguished Vietnamese American writer and novelist.
Looking for names like Monique?
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Compare Monique to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Monique against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).