Variant of Marjorie, from French marguerite meaning 'pearl' or 'daisy.'
Majorie is a warmly idiosyncratic spelling of Marjorie — or its ancestor Margery — a name that has traveled an extraordinary distance from its Greek origins to the fields of medieval Scotland. The root is Margaret, from the Greek *margarites*, meaning pearl, which was itself borrowed from Persian or Sanskrit sources. Through Latin and Old French the name became Marguerite, then through English diminution Margery and Marjorie, names so thoroughly naturalized in Scotland and England by the thirteenth century that they came to feel native.
Marjorie holds particular Scottish resonance: Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert the Bruce, was born in 1296 and her marriage to Walter Stewart produced the lineage that would become the House of Stuart, shaping the thrones of Scotland and later England for centuries. The name was fashionable in medieval Britain precisely because of this royal association, then faded during the Renaissance before reviving strongly in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, when medievalism was again in vogue. Marjorie enjoyed its American peak in the 1920s and 1930s, carried in part by Booth Tarkington's 1914 novel *Penrod*, which featured a Marjorie as an appealing romantic interest.
The spelling Majorie — dropping the first r — appears in census records and family documents from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often reflecting phonetic spelling in communities where the name was passed along orally rather than copied from books. This variant has a softened, slightly more mellifluous quality than the standard form, and today it reads as a genuinely antique treasure: a name that clearly belongs to a real person who lived a real life, rather than to a trend.