May

About May

May is an English month name, a name for hawthorn blossom, and a familiar shortening of several older given names. Its one-syllable sound is simple, but its history reaches from the Roman calendar to American poetry and the artistic world of the Alcott family.

A month and a family of nicknames

The month of May takes its name from the Roman goddess Maia. Her name is probably connected with Latin maior, meaning “greater.” Roman Maia was later associated with the Greek goddess of the same spelling, though the two began in separate religious traditions.

As an English given name, May can refer directly to the month. The flower connection comes from “may” as a name for hawthorn blossom, another familiar feature of the season.

May also developed as a nickname for Mary, Margaret, and Mabel. Those names have separate origins, so a May used within one of those families has a different route from a child named directly after the month. Mae is the closely related alternative spelling.

Sound and form

May is pronounced exactly like the English month, rhyming with “day.” It has one syllable and no silent final consonant. Mae has the same usual pronunciation.

May can stand on its own or remain a familiar form of a longer name. Its relationship with Mary, Margaret, or Mabel depends on which full name is being shortened; the identical spoken form does not require a single parent name.

May Swenson’s poetry

The American poet May Swenson lived from 1913 to 1989. Born in Logan, Utah, she studied at Utah State before eventually moving to New York in the 1930s.

Her books include Another Animal, published in 1954, and Iconographs, published in 1970. Swenson experimented with the visual arrangement of poems on the page, making their shapes part of the experience of reading them. Her attention to animals, everyday objects, and the natural world gives her work a precise, observant character. She received a MacArthur fellowship as well as recognition within the poetry world.

An artist in the Alcott family

Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, known as May, was Louisa May Alcott’s youngest sister and an artist in her own right. She studied in Boston with artists including William Rimmer and William Morris Hunt.

The success of Little Women in 1868 helped finance her travel and study in Europe. Her still-life painting Fruit and Bottle was accepted for the Paris Salon in 1877. That achievement gives May a concrete connection with professional artistic ambition in the nineteenth century, alongside Swenson’s later literary one.

Popularity in the United States

May ranked No. 57 for girls in 1880. Its highest recorded annual count came in 1919, with 981 girls. It became much less common later in the twentieth century.

In 2000, 89 girls received May; in 2025, there were 183, ranking it No. 1,233. Its recent use is modest, with some recovery from that turn-of-the-century level.

How popular is May?

In 2025, May ranked #1,233 among girls in the United States, with 183 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1880; its largest annual count was 981 in 1919. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.