Maisie has 11,620 cumulative American girls on SSA record and currently sits at rank 255, which is also its all-time peak reached in 2024. The chart history began in earnest only after 2010, which makes Maisie a true 21st-century revival of a Scottish diminutive that has crossed the Atlantic on the strength of multiple cultural anchors.
The Scottish source through Margaret
Maisie is a Scottish diminutive of Margaret, which traces through Latin Margarita to Greek margarites meaning "pearl." The Scottish naming tradition produced multiple Margaret diminutives including Maisie, Maggie, Meg, Mag, and Mamie, with each form carrying slightly different regional and class registers within Scottish-speaking communities. Maisie was particularly common in 19th and early 20th-century Scotland and northern England.
The English-language pickup of Maisie outside Scotland was modest until the late 20th century, when British literary and cultural transmission began bringing the diminutive into American naming. Henry James's What Maisie Knew (1897) is the deep literary anchor, with later film adaptations (notably 2012) keeping the name in cultural rotation.
The Game of Thrones effect and the British-cute cluster
British actress Maisie Williams (born 1997), who played Arya Stark on Game of Thrones from 2011 to 2019, gave the name its highest-visibility modern American anchor. Her career through the show's eight-season run coincided exactly with the SSA chart's first significant American climb, and the cultural transmission is unusually clean. The Stark character's compelling arc across eight seasons gave Maisie an additional cultural register beyond the actress herself, with parents picking the name often citing the character as part of the inspiration.
Maisie travels with a cluster of British diminutive nicknames that have moved onto American girls in the 2010s and 2020s: Sadie, Hattie, Millie, Mollie, Daisy, and Gracie all share the structure. The cluster reads warm, slightly old-fashioned, and unmistakably British-influenced, with parents picking from this lane reaching for the soft-Edwardian register.
The counter-reading
The honest concern with Maisie is the diminutive-as-given-name question. Some parents prefer Margaret as the formal name with Maisie as the everyday calling form, on the grounds that the formal version offers more flexibility across adult professional contexts. Maisie as a stand-alone reads slightly more child-pegged than the parent name, though many adult bearers carry it without trouble.
Sibling pairings lean British-vintage: Maisie and Sadie, Maisie and Hattie, Maisie and Millie. Middle names tend longer and more formal to balance: Maisie Caroline, Maisie Elizabeth, Maisie Madeline. Browse Scottish-origin girl names or rising names.