Variant of Daisy, from Old English 'dæges eage' meaning 'day's eye,' the flower.
Daisie is a charming variant spelling of Daisy, a name with one of the most poetic etymologies in the English language. The word daisy derives from the Old English dæges ēage — literally "day's eye" — because the flower closes at night and opens each morning to greet the light. This image, so simple and so quietly beautiful, made the daisy a recurring symbol in medieval English literature: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote lovingly of the daisy in his prologue to The Legend of Good Women, calling it his favorite flower and describing how he would rise early just to watch it open.
As a given name, Daisy flourished in the late Victorian era, riding the wave of flower names — Rose, Violet, Lily, Iris — that became fashionable in the 1880s and 1890s. The name carries a particular cultural charge through its literary and artistic associations: Daisy Buchanan, F. Scott Fitzgerald's glittering, careless heroine in The Great Gatsby, made the name synonymous with a certain kind of luminous, elusive charm.
Henry James's novella Daisy Miller gave the name another iconic American character — young, free, and tragically misread by the European world around her. In children's literature, Daisy is a byword for warmth and innocence. Daisie, with its -ie ending rather than -y, gives the name a slightly more antique, handwritten quality — the spelling that might have appeared in a nineteenth-century family Bible or on a hand-stitched sampler. It feels both delicate and determined, like the flower itself, which pushes through lawns and meadows with cheerful, unstoppable persistence.