Maisey is a variant of Maisie, a Scottish pet form of Margaret, ultimately meaning pearl.
Maisey is a variant of Maisie, itself a Scottish pet form of Margaret — a name with one of the longest and most storied pedigrees in Western naming history. Margaret derives from the Latin Margarita, borrowed from Greek Margaritēs, meaning "pearl." The pearl image carried immense symbolic weight in the ancient and medieval world — purity, rarity, hidden beauty discovered only through patience and depth — and it animated a long roll call of queens, saints, and literary heroines bearing the name in its many forms across the centuries.
The specifically Scottish diminutive Maisie (and by extension Maisey) carries a warmer, more intimate register than Margaret's formal grandeur. It belongs to a tradition of affectionate nicknames that took on lives of their own: Peggy, Maggie, Molly, May. Henry James gave the form literary gravity with his 1897 novel What Maisie Knew, a psychologically complex portrait of a child navigating her parents' bitter divorce — a book that made the name feel simultaneously innocent and worldly-wise.
Rumer Godden's 1993 children's book The Story of Holly and Ivy also featured a Maisie, keeping the name alive in nursery culture. The Maisey spelling — substituting -ey for the traditional -ie ending — reflects a broader contemporary preference for that suffix, seen also in Daisy, Lacey, and Paisley, names that feel folksy and handcrafted rather than formally spelled. Maisey experienced a significant revival in the 2010s as part of the vintage-name renaissance, appealing to parents who wanted something that felt warmly old-fashioned without being stiff. It is a name with pearl at its root and a Scottish morning mist around its edges.