From Old French 'ami' meaning friend, or a place-based surname from Amesbury.
Ames arrives as a given name by way of the surname route, rooted in the Old French personal name Ami, meaning 'friend,' or in some branches from the Latin amicus carrying the same sense. As a surname it spread widely through England and colonial America, where it produced a notable lineage: Oakes Ames, the Massachusetts congressman whose Credit Mobilier railroad dealings became a 19th-century political scandal, and his brother Oliver Ames, president of the Union Pacific Railroad. The Iowa college town of Ames was named in Oakes Ames's honor during the transcontinental railroad era, giving the name a geographic anchor in the American Midwest.
Adelbert Ames, a Union general and Reconstruction-era governor of Mississippi, and Fisher Ames, one of the founding generation's more eloquent Federalist voices, show how the surname traveled through American political life. As a given name Ames remained uncommon, functioning mainly as an honorific surname passed forward to sons in families with strong patrilineal pride. In the contemporary naming landscape Ames occupies the appealing space between classic and novel — it sounds like a name you've heard without being able to immediately place it.
Short, confident, and subtly literary (there is an Ames, Iowa literary festival tradition built around the state's writing community), it fits the modern preference for crisp, single-syllable names that carry weight without ostentation. It suggests friendliness at its etymological core while wearing a quietly distinguished surname-name polish.