Ivorie is a decorative spelling of Ivory, from the word for the pale material from tusks.
Ivorie is a variant spelling of Ivory, a given name that traces its roots through Old French ivoire and Medieval Latin eboreus back to the Latin ebur, meaning ivory — the dense, creamy-white material derived from elephant tusks and prized across ancient civilizations for sculpture, ornamentation, and luxury goods. The ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, and Chinese all used ivory extensively, and the word passed through the linguistic pipeline of conquest and trade to arrive in English by the thirteenth century. As a given name, Ivory emerged primarily in the African-American naming tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, carrying aesthetic associations of whiteness and purity that were simultaneously cultural counterstatements in the context of American racial history — a reclamation of beauty language for children who were most often described in the opposite terms.
The name gained broader cultural resonance through the music world: Ivory Joe Hunter was a pioneering rhythm-and-blues and country crossover artist of the 1940s and 1950s whose career presaged the genre fusions that would transform American popular music. Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney's 1982 duet "Ebony and Ivory" — with its message of racial harmony encoded in the complementary tones of piano keys — gave the ivory concept new symbolic currency, though it addressed the word as metaphor rather than name. The soap brand Ivory, launched by Procter & Gamble in 1879 with its famous purity claim, also embedded the word deep in American domestic consciousness.
Ivorie, with its -ie ending, belongs to the contemporary American tradition of feminizing variant spellings — Ivorie sits alongside Aurie, Everie, and Lorelei in a cluster of names where the -ie suffix adds softness and visual warmth. It retains all the luminous, tactile quality of the original while feeling slightly more given-name than noun, more personal than material. Parents drawn to Ivorie often cite its combination of rarity and immediate legibility — a name that no one has to pause over, yet few have heard before.