Maeghan
Feminine · “pearl”
Maeghan adds two letters to Megan, and one of them is the most useless pair in English. Gh spells nothing at all in night, though, daughter and bought — it is the fossil of a sound English stopped making six hundred years ago, and the spelling has been carrying the corpse ever since.
How old is the name Maeghan?
Maeghan first appears in US birth records in 1976 — 49 years ago. The typical Maeghan alive today was born around 1995, making them about 30 years old. About 1,000 people named Maeghan are estimated to be alive in the US today.
When was the name Maeghan most popular?
Maeghan peaked in 1990, reaching #2174 nationally. See the whole 1990 chart.
Lists built from the same records:
Where it comes from
From Greek margarites, a pearl to Maeghan
The story of Maeghan
The story of gh is one of the reasons English spelling looks the way it does. Scribes wrote it for a sound English inherited from Germanic; over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that sound weakened, disappeared in some words, and turned into an f in others — which is why enough, tough and laugh are spelled as though they should rhyme with though and are not. Printing arrived at exactly the wrong moment, freezing the spellings while the pronunciation was still moving, and every English child since has had to learn the fossils one at a time.
Meaning
pearl, at several removes
Megan is a Welsh pet form of Margaret, which came into Europe from a Greek word for a pearl and before that, most likely, from Persian. The gh in this spelling has no counterpart in the Welsh name or in the Greek one; it has been imported from English spelling habits, where it is silent in almost every word that carries it. Once, in Chaucer's English, it wrote a rasping sound in the back of the throat, the one German still has in nacht. English lost the sound and kept the letters.
How the name formed
- Greek margarites, a pearl
- Margaret spreads across Europe and Wales makes Megan from it
- English keeps gh long after the sound behind it vanished
- Meghan and Maeghan appear as American spellings
- the whole family peaks in the 1990s
Related forms: Megan · Meghan · Meagan
Pronouncing Maeghan
MEG-un
Two syllables, stress at the front. Neither the ae nor the gh is sounded, so this spelling has four letters doing the work of two and produces exactly the same name.
Nicknames for Maeghan
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
- 1976
- Most girls named
- 199059 — the highest on record
- Peak rank
- #2174reached in 1990
- Change vs 2011
- −41.2%10 in 2012, from 17
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.
Maeghan in other languages
The same name elsewhere
- Megan in Welsh — spelling variant
- Meghan in English — spelling variant
- Meagan in English — spelling variant
Maeghans among us
people named Maeghan 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
Maeghan 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
- The sound is completely familiar and has been in use in Wales for centuries.
- Meg and Maggie are both available and both are being rediscovered.
- The written form is rare while the spoken name is entirely ordinary.
- There are at least five spellings in circulation and she will be given all of them.
- Two of the letters in this version do nothing whatever, which some people will call an error.
- The name is closely dated to the last two decades of the century.
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Maeghan
Feminine
Frequently asked
- How many Maeghans are there in the world?
- No country counts the world's names, so there is no worldwide figure — anyone quoting one is estimating. About 1,000 people named Maeghan are estimated to be alive in the US today.
- How popular is the name Maeghan in 2025?
- Maeghan is rarely given in the US today — it does not rank in the top 2000 girl names.
- Will my child share the name Maeghan with classmates?
- Maeghan 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 Maeghan? See the current top 100.
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US figures from the Social Security Administration. 1880–2025. Data & methodology
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