Mary, Madison, Mabel: the names that start with Ma

In 1880 one American girl in six had a name beginning with Ma. Not one girl in six called Mary, though Mary alone was one in 14. One girl in six across 67 names: Mary, Margaret 6th, Martha 16th, Maude 21st, Mabel 22nd, Mattie 29th, Maggie, Marie, Mamie, May. No other two letters came close. The next biggest start, El, had 47 girls in every 1,000 to Ma's 166. Ma was the biggest start for American girls in every year from 1880 to 1967, 88 years, and then it fell to one girl in 43. By 1988 it was the eleventh biggest start in the country.

It came back. A different name brought it back, Madison, which was not a girls' name at all until 1985, and by 1998 Ma was the biggest start again. It still is, in both countries: one American girl in 20 in 2017, and one girl in 15 in England and Wales in 2025, where Ma beats El by 69 girls per 1,000 to 44. The twist is which names. America's Ma girls are Madison, Maya, Madelyn and Mackenzie. Britain's are Mabel 16th, Matilda 19th, Maeve, Margot and Maisie. Mabel was 22nd in America in 1880 and Matilda 101st, and both left the American top 1,000 after 1964. Britain has brought back the Ma names of 1880. America has written new ones.

How we counted

A name counts if its first two letters, as the official file spells it, are M and a. That is spelling, not sound, so Maya and Mary both count and Mia and Mila do not. Boys and girls are counted from their own lists in the files, never from our catalogue's flag. There is no hand list. The American series from 1880 to 2008 holds the top 1,000 names each year, so its figures are a floor; the full American files for 1990 to 2017 and the English and Welsh file for 2025 count every name. American counts are from 2017, the newest full count we hold, and the American rankings run to 2025. We did the same count for El last week, and found there that Ma was the biggest start in both countries. This is the article on why.

Mary and her 66 neighbours

In 1880 Mary was given to 72 girls in every 1,000 and was 44% of all the Ma girls. The rest of the group was big on its own: Margaret 16 per 1,000, Martha 11, Maude 9, Mabel 8, Mattie 7. Together they came to 166 per 1,000, one girl in six. Nothing else in the whole run of American records is that concentrated on two letters. The group lost a little every decade: one girl in seven by 1900, one in nine by 1940, one in 11 by 1950. Mary was still the number one name in the country in 1960 and still 44% of the group, but the group had shrunk to one girl in 18, because the names around Mary had gone. Maude left the top 1,000 after 1950, Mabel and Matilda after 1964, and Margaret fell from 4th in 1920 to 36th in 1960 and 105th in 1980.

Then Mary went too. 9th in 1970, 26th in 1980, 35th in 1990, 97th in 2008. The group went with it: one girl in 30 in 1970, one in 38 in 1980, one in 43 in 1988, the low point. In 1968 Ma lost the lead among starts for the first time, to Li, on the strength of Lisa; then Je held it for nineteen years on Jennifer, then Ka. By 1988 Ma was eleventh. The names that held the group up in those years were Maria, 31st in 1973 and the second biggest Ma name in America from 1960 to 1994, Marissa, Mallory and Mandy. In the 1990 full file Mary was still, just, the biggest Ma name in America: 8,651 girls to Maria's 7,173.

Madison changed that. It was a boys' name in 1880, 370th, and stayed on the boys' list until 2004. As a girls' name it was first listed in 1985, at 628th. Ten years later it was 29th and the biggest Ma name in America, the first name other than Mary to lead the group in 115 years. In 2000 it was 3rd, in 2001 2nd, with 11 girls in every 1,000 and 23% of the group. Behind it came Mackenzie, Makayla, Madeline and Mariah, and the group doubled in ten years, from one girl in 40 in 1990 to one in 21 in 2000. In 1998 Ma was the biggest start again. The full 2008 file is the biggest year we hold: 121,142 American girls, one in 16, across 1,097 spellings.

The boys: Martin, Marvin, Mark, Matthew, Mason, Mateo

American boys had almost no Ma names in 1880: 14 in every 1,000, one boy in 73, the eighteenth biggest start. Martin was the biggest at 45th, then Marion, Matthew at 117th and Mark at 160th. It stayed between one boy in 60 and one in 75 for sixty-five years, with Marvin taking over the lead from Martin in 1915. Then Mark went from 47th in 1947 to 7th in 1958, and the group nearly tripled in thirteen years, to one boy in 24 by 1960. That year Mark alone was 27 boys per 1,000 and 65% of the group. Matthew passed Mark in 1972, was 6th in 1980 and 3rd in 1985, and in 1983 the group reached its high, 48 boys per 1,000, one in 21. In the 1990 full file Matthew was 44,788 of the 96,005 Ma boys, nearly half.

The handover after that is the same story as the girls', with a surname in place of Madison. Mason was 371st in 1880, 888th in 1957, 64th in 2000, and passed Matthew in the 2010 file, 14,728 to 13,954. It was 3rd in America in 2015. Then Mateo, first listed in 1995, went from 85th in 2015 to 8th in 2025, passing Mason in 2021, and Maverick went from 184th to 49th. The group has stayed between one boy in 20 and one in 31 since 1960: 90,124 American boys in 2017, one in 20, which is the same rate as the girls. Ma is the second biggest start for American boys now, behind Ja.

Britain: Mabel and Matilda

In England and Wales in 2025, 17,466 girls had a name beginning Ma, one in 15, across 392 spellings. It is the biggest start here by a wide margin, 69 girls per 1,000 to El's 44 and Ha's 35, and nine Ma names are in our top 100: Mabel 16th with 1,527 girls, Matilda 19th, Maeve 26th, Maya 28th, Margot 30th, Maisie 43rd, Maryam 52nd, Maria 88th and Marnie 97th. America has six in its top 100 and shares three of them with us, Maya, Maeve and Maria. The rest of America's are Madison 40th, Madelyn 71st and Madeline 81st; here Madison is 175th with 280 girls, Madeline 304th, and Madelyn had 47.

Look at where Britain's names were in America in 1880. Mabel was 22nd. Martha, 164th here with 302 girls, was 16th. Maggie, 184th here, was 46th. Matilda was 101st. Maria was 131st. Of the nine Ma names in our top 100, the two biggest are 1880 American names that America dropped: Mabel left the American top 1,000 after 1964 and was 578th when the rankings pick it up again in 2015; Matilda left in the same year and came back at 829th in 2008. Neither is near the American top 100 now, Mabel 201st and Matilda 365th. Per head Matilda is 16 times commoner here than there, 1,449 girls to 597 in a country nearly seven times the size, and Mabel 15 times. Maisie, 11 times, was never in the American top 1,000 at all between 1880 and 2008. Maeve is 10 times, Margot 10, Maryam 9, Martha 5.5.

The other way: Madison is four times commoner in America, Margaret 3.4 times (98 girls here, 2,242 there), Madeline 3, Mary 2.7. Mary is 329th in England and Wales with 131 girls, and 125th in America. Then there are the American Ma names that barely exist here. Madelyn went to 3,939 American girls in 2017 and 47 English and Welsh girls in 2025. Mackenzie 2,941 and 15. Mariah 1,604 and 28. Makayla 1,492 and 22. And two British names that barely exist there: Marnie, 467 girls here and 30 in all America, and Maeva, 366 and 42.

Every Ma name in either country's top 100 in 2025. The last column is the name's rank for that sex in America in 1880; “out” means outside the top 1,000. American babies are counted in 2017, the newest full count we hold.

The boys here: Max, and not much else

British boys do not get Ma names the way British girls do. 7,819 boys in 2025, one in 35, against one girl in 15; and it is the sixth biggest start for boys here, behind Ar, Ja, Ro, Al and Mu. Two are in the top 100, Max 48th with 1,061 boys and Mason 77th with 675. Marley is next at 395, then Matthew 353, Mateo and Matteo with 328 each, Maxwell 274 and Maximilian 245. America's four top-100 Ma boys are 8th, 32nd, 39th and 49th; ours are 48th and 77th. Matthew is five times commoner there per head, Maverick six and a half times, Mateo 3.5, Mason 3. Marley, 12 times commoner here as a boys' name, is the one that goes the other way by a distance; Max is 2.3 times, Maximilian 2.5. So the Ma count splits by sex and by country at once: Britain gives the two letters to girls, 1.4 times more often than America does, and America gives them to boys, 1.7 times more often than we do.

Since 2017

The American rankings say the two countries are moving towards each other, and it is America that is moving. Madison has fallen in eight of the last ten years, 11th in 2015 to 40th now, and the names that came up with it have fallen further: Mackenzie 73rd to 228th, Makayla 143rd to 568th, Mariah 152nd to 448th, Makenzie 211th to 700th, Marissa out of the top 1,000 altogether. The Ma names climbing in America are Britain's. Maeve went from 452nd to 76th and rose in every year to 2023. Margot went from 593rd to 102nd, Mabel from 578th to 201st, Maisie from 625th to 233rd, Matilda from 536th to 365th. Magnolia, 635th to 124th, is the one big climber that is not a British name; it had 13 girls here. Margaret has edged up, 155th to 112th, and Mary has not moved: 123rd in 2015, 125th now, never above 123rd or below 136th in between. The number of Ma names in the American girls' top 1,000 went from 56 to 65.

For boys the direction is Mateo. Mason fell from 3rd to 39th and Matthew from 15th to 32nd while Mateo rose from 85th to 8th, and Matias went from 459th to 170th. The old ones kept falling: Mark 196th to 245th, Marcus 168th to 258th, Martin 275th to 335th, Mario 284th to 438th. In England and Wales, where we hold two years, the Ma girls went up 1.2% between 2024 and 2025 while all girls fell 1.8%, and almost all of the rise was Mabel, 1,113 girls to 1,527, 37th to 16th, and Matilda, 1,220 to 1,449. Maya went the other way, 1,592 to 1,259, and lost its place as the biggest Ma name here to Mabel. The Ma boys fell 5.8% against 1.5% for all boys, mostly Mason, 806 to 675. One year is not a trend and we do not call it one.

What we cannot tell you

Why. The files hold what parents wrote, and two letters do not have a reason. We can say that the Ma names of 1880 are back in Britain under their own spellings and that America chose new ones; we cannot say why. The rule counts letters, so it puts Madison and Maryam together when nobody saying them would, and it leaves out Mia and Mila, which most people would hear as the same family. The long American series is a floor, because it holds only the top 1,000 names, and the full files show the gap: in 2000 the series gives 47 girls per 1,000 and the full file 64, because a thousand small spellings sit below the line. We do not hold 2009 to 2014 for America, so we cannot say which year Mabel or Matilda got back into the top 1,000. And we hold two British years, so Britain's own history of Ma, and whether Mabel and Matilda were ever as big here as they were in 1880 America, is not in this article. The 1880 figures for Mary herself are in the article on every number one name since 1880.

What it means for you

If you are in Britain and choosing a Ma name for a girl, you are choosing the commonest start there is: one girl in 15, and five of the top 30. Mabel and Matilda are the ones going up. If you want the letters without the company, Martha, 302 girls, Mae, 108, and Margaret, 98, are the 1880 names Britain has not brought back yet, and Marnie and Maeva are ours and almost nobody else's. If you are in America, Maeve and Margot are the Ma names on the way up, Madison and Mackenzie the ones on the way down, and Mary, at 125th, has sat still for ten years.