Kimmie is an English pet form of Kimberly or Kim, used as an affectionate diminutive.
Kimmie is the warmly affectionate diminutive of Kimberly, a name whose history is tied to a moment of geological violence: Kimberley, the diamond-mining city of South Africa, was named for Lord Kimberley, British Colonial Secretary in 1871, and the city gave its name to the distinctive rock matrix in which diamonds are found — kimberlite. The place name itself derives from the Old English Cyneburg, a compound of cyne (royal) and burh (fortress or settlement), a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon toponym. When the Boer War made Kimberley famous around the world in the 1890s, Kimberly began a quiet transition from place name to personal name.
The name Kimberly surged to enormous popularity in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the defining feminine names of the baby boom generation. Its popularity generated a cascade of nicknames — Kim, Kimmy, Kimmie — and these softer forms took on lives of their own. Kim became independent and serious; Kimmie kept the girlish warmth of childhood nicknames without necessarily losing ground to adulthood.
Notable bearers have included actress Kim Novak and countless cultural figures who helped define the name's mid-century American character. Kimmie as a given name rather than a nickname reflects the broader twentieth-century pattern of nursery names escaping the nursery entirely and appearing on birth certificates. It carries an irrepressible friendliness — the double-M and the final '-ee' together create a sound that is almost onomatopoeically cheerful. Bearers of Kimmie often find it serves them well precisely because it refuses to be imposing, creating immediate approachability in any room.