Daisy
- Pronunciation
- [Dai-sy]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- "The Day's Eye."
- Origin
- Anglo
About the Name Daisy
Daisy descends from the Old English dæges ēage meaning literally "day's eye" — referring to the daisy flower (Bellis perennis), which opens its white-and-yellow petals at sunrise and closes them at sunset. The flower's symbolic register is overwhelmingly positive across Western tradition: in medieval European Christianity the daisy was associated with the Virgin Mary's purity; in the Victorian flower-language of the 19th century, daisies symbolized innocence and youth.
Daisy has been used in English-language naming for over a millennium as a casual nickname for Margaret (because the French daisy is marguerite, the French word for both the flower and the name) and as a standalone name during the late Victorian flower-name revival of the 1880s and 1890s. Notable bearers include the fictional Daisy Buchanan of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) — the iconic Jazz-Age beauty whose voice "sounds like money"; Daisy Ridley (British actress, born 1992, Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy); and 19th-century American novelist Daisy Goodwin (the Disney character Daisy Duck, introduced 1940, also gave the name a friendly mid-20th-century cartoon register).
Daisy held a US top-200 girls' rank in nearly every decade since 1880, with a peak in the 1900s and 1910s and another rise in the 2010s. The contemporary American Daisy surge is part of the broader vintage-revival wave alongside Hazel and Ivy. The name climbed into the US top 100 girls' rank by 2014 and the top 100 since. The name's appeal is its compact botanical sweetness — two short syllables, soft consonants, instantly readable, and the in-built innocence and youth imagery. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — Day, Daze, Daze-y, and the rare Margery (the longer formal Margaret-derived form) each carry distinct registers. International forms include Marguerite (French), Margherita (Italian), and the related Margaret family across European languages.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Daisy
US Popularity History (1880–2025)
Annual US births named Daisy by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2025 with 3,206 girls named Daisy (girl rank #75 that year).
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 Daisy Most Popular?
Average girl-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 girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Daisy the strongest states are Wyoming, Vermont, Idaho.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wyoming | #72 | 18 |
| 2 | Vermont | #76 | 17 |
| 3 | Idaho | #92 | 184 |
| 4 | Utah | #93 | 420 |
| 5 | California | #100 | 2,949 |
| 6 | Arizona | #100 | 539 |
| 7 | Oregon | #103 | 301 |
| 8 | Rhode Island | #114 | 31 |
| 9 | Washington | #118 | 536 |
| 10 | Alaska | #123 | 39 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New Jersey | #235 | 333 |
| 2 | Louisiana | #235 | 208 |
| 3 | Maryland | #228 | 238 |
| 4 | New York | #227 | 755 |
| 5 | Connecticut | #219 | 143 |
| 6 | Iowa | #216 | 171 |
| 7 | Massachusetts | #213 | 279 |
| 8 | Alabama | #207 | 229 |
| 9 | South Carolina | #207 | 224 |
| 10 | Virginia | #207 | 389 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Daisy in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daisey | Day's Eye. A Flower Name. | Female | English |
Looking for names like Daisy?
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 Daisy to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Daisy against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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