Mame

Popularity over time

Name story

Mame is one of those felicitously brief names that manage to feel both deeply familiar and slightly theatrical — which is perhaps why it found its most lasting life on the stage. A diminutive of Mary or Margaret, Mame follows the same nursery-shortening tradition that produced Mamie, Molly, and Maisie from the same root: the Hebrew Miriam, that ancient name whose precise meaning has generated scholarly debate for centuries, with candidates including "beloved," "wished-for child," and "sea of bitterness." The name's cultural high-water mark arrived in 1955 when Patrick Dennis published his comic novel "Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade," chronicling the outrageously bohemian aunt who raises her orphaned nephew through a series of improbable adventures spanning the Jazz Age to the postwar years.

The book was a runaway bestseller, spawning a Broadway play in 1956, a film adaptation in 1958 with Rosalind Russell in the title role, and a Broadway musical in 1966 that became one of the defining shows of that decade. Auntie Mame — free-spirited, extravagant, magnificently undeterred by convention — stamped the name with an indelible personality. Before Dennis's novel, Mame circulated quietly as a family nickname and occasional formal name in American households of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

After it, the name belonged to a character type as much as to any individual: the woman who sweeps into a room and makes the walls expand. It is a small name that has always contained an enormous amount of life.