Myrtle

What does Myrtle mean?

Myrtle is an English plant name, taken from the evergreen shrub. The word's older history reaches back to Greek myrtos. As a first name, it belongs to the nineteenth-century fashion for names drawn from flowers, trees, and other plants.

Its greatest American popularity came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The name also has recognizable associations with Canadian athlete Myrtle Cook and the character Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby.

The plant behind the name

Common myrtle, Myrtus communis, has aromatic evergreen leaves and small white flowers. The flowers are followed by berries, giving the shrub a place in gardens across more than one season.

Its dense foliage can be shaped into hedges or topiary.

The personal name developed from the ordinary English plant word during the nineteenth century. It sits within the same broad botanical naming tradition as Rose, Violet, and Hazel, while keeping the distinctive sound of the shrub's own name.

Myrtle Cook and Olympic history

Canadian sprinter Myrtle Cook gives the name an important sporting connection. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, she ran the final leg for Canada's gold-medal-winning women's 4-by-100-meter relay team.

Cook was one of the Canadian women whose appearances helped establish women's track and field at the Olympic Games. Her sporting life continued after competition: in 1929 she moved to Montreal and began a long career as a sports columnist for the Montreal Daily Star.

She became an advocate for women's sport and remained involved in Olympic and Commonwealth competition in several roles. Cook entered the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 1949 and Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1955.

Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby

Myrtle Wilson gives the name a familiar literary association. She appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, as Tom Buchanan's mistress.

Her desire to enter a wealthier social world forms part of the novel's examination of class and status. Fitzgerald places her alongside characters whose money, aspirations, and relationships repeatedly bring them into conflict.

The novel's continuing readership has kept Myrtle recognizable as a character name, even as its use for babies became much less common than it had been around the turn of the twentieth century.

Pronunciation and related forms

Myrtle is pronounced MER-tul, with stress on the first syllable. The final le forms a light second syllable, much as it does in little.

Myrtie is an established familiar form. Mirta, Myrto, and Dutch forms such as Mirte belong to related naming traditions drawn from the same plant.

Myrtle in the United States

Myrtle reached its best American girls' rank, No. 27, in 1894. Its largest annual count came in 1918, with 4,076 babies. These figures place Myrtle among the botanical names with a particularly strong American history around the late Victorian and early twentieth-century periods.

How popular is Myrtle?

In 2025, Myrtle ranked #11,607 among girls in the United States, with 8 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for girls in 1880; its largest annual count was 4,076 in 1918. 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.