Maegan
Feminine · “pearl”
Maegan is Welsh underneath and looks Irish on top. Megan is the Welsh pet form of Margaret — Meg with the Welsh diminutive -an added — and it has been a Welsh name in its own right for centuries. The ae in this spelling comes from a different country's orthography entirely and is doing purely visual work.
How old is the name Maegan?
Maegan first appears in US birth records in 1970 — 55 years ago. The typical Maegan alive today was born around 1993, making them about 32 years old. About 9,000 people named Maegan are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Maegan most popular?
Maegan peaked in 1987, reaching #505 nationally. See the whole 1987 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From margarites to Maegan
The story of Maegan
Wales took Margaret as Marged and shortened it the way Welsh shortens things, and Megan stayed inside Wales for a long time before becoming a general English-language name in the twentieth century. The respellings followed almost immediately, and they went somewhere unexpected: the ae digraph belongs to English attempts at Irish spelling, where it stands in for a vowel combination Irish writes differently. Applied to a Welsh name it is doubly foreign — it is not Welsh, and it is not really Irish either, only an English idea of what Irish looks like.
Meaning
pearl
Megan descends from Marged, the Welsh form of Margaret, by way of Meg and the Welsh ending -an, which makes a name affectionate. Margaret goes back to Greek margarites, a pearl, which reached Greek from further east along with the object itself. The meaning is settled and carries through every step. The ae is a later English spelling choice and adds nothing to it.
How the name formed
- margarites
- Marged
- Megan
- Maegan
Related forms: Megan · Marged · Margarites
Pronouncing Maegan
MEG-un
MEG-un, two syllables, stress at the front, the ae said as a short e. A reader who gives the ae its own value produces MAY-gun, which is a common first attempt and not the name — the spelling genuinely invites the mistake.
Nicknames for Maegan
Moderate
What the data says
146 years of official birth records
The long climb, and where it stands now
The same years in position rather than babies
- First recorded
- 1970
- Most girls named
- 1991431 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #505reached in 1987
- Change vs 2022
- +40.0%7 in 2023, from 5
Rank is a position, a count is a headcount, and they move independently — a name can hold its rank while the number of babies behind it falls. Source: U.S. Social Security Administration.
Maegan in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Megan in Welsh — same name
- Marged in Welsh — related form
- Margarites in Greek — related form
Maegans among us
people named Maegan are estimated to be alive in the US today
Estimated from SSA birth records and published actuarial life tables. Method
Is it right for you
Questions parents actually ask
Fashion outlook
Maegan sits outside the current charts, and that is its own kind of answer: naming cycles can only date the names they carried up. A name this rare has no decade stamped on it — it cannot go out of fashion, because it was never in.
Based on 146 years of naming cycles. How we read them
The trade-off
- It descends from a documented Welsh name with an unbroken line back to Greek.
- Meg is a complete short form with its own long history.
- Mae is available as a short form only in this spelling, which gives it something the standard version lacks.
- The ae is read as a long a by first-time readers, so this spelling gets mispronounced as well as misspelled.
- Megan, Meghan and Meagan are all far more common, and this one will be rewritten as one of them.
- The ae implies an Irish origin the name does not have, which anyone who knows either language will notice.
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What they receive
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Maegan
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Maegans are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 9,000 people named Maegan are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Maegan in 2025?
- Maegan is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Maegan with classmates?
- Maegan will almost certainly be the only one in school.
More M names
The most-given names starting with M, all years combined.
Mary#125 · Margaret#112 · Michelle#465 · Melissa#419 · Maria#87 · Martha#712 · Marie#617 · Mildred#1962
Looking for what else is popular rather than what resembles Maegan? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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