Variant of Mallory, from a French surname meaning unfortunate; also linked with Sir Thomas Malory.
Malory — also spelled Mallory — is a name with a wonderfully paradoxical history: it comes from the Old French malheureux, meaning "unfortunate" or "ill-fated," and yet it has become a name associated with literary greatness and spirited individualism. As an Anglo-Norman surname carried into England after the Conquest, it was common enough that it produced one of the most consequential authors in the English language: Sir Thomas Malory, who compiled and translated Le Morte d'Arthur in the 15th century, the definitive English-language account of the Arthurian legends. Without Malory, the world might never have received the fully realized versions of Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and the Round Table that have shaped Western culture ever since.
The surname-to-given-name transition was a 20th-century development, gathering pace particularly in the United States from the 1970s onward. In 1982, the American sitcom Family Ties introduced a main character named Mallory Keaton, a cheerfully shallow teenager played by Justine Bateman — which introduced the name to millions of households and gave it a firmly feminine, middle-American connotation. Yet the name also appears in more adventurous contexts: George Mallory, the British mountaineer who may have summited Everest before his death in 1924, gave it an association with daring and tragic beauty.
Today Malory and Mallory are used for both boys and girls, though predominantly feminine in contemporary usage. The name's dark etymological origin is thoroughly forgotten by most who bear it — what remains is its literary weight and its sound, unhurried and elegant.