French diminutive of Maurice, from Latin 'Maurus' meaning dark-skinned or Moorish.
Maury is a variant of Maurice, which descends from the Latin Mauritius — itself derived from Maurus, a term Romans used for people from Mauretania, the ancient North African region roughly corresponding to modern Morocco and Algeria. The root carries the meaning dark or dark-skinned, a geographic and ethnic descriptor that Romans applied with straightforward descriptiveness rather than the loaded connotations it would later acquire. Saint Maurice, a third-century Roman soldier and Christian martyr executed in what is now Switzerland, became one of the most venerated military saints of medieval Europe, and his feast day on September 22 ensured that Maurice and its variants spread widely through baptismal rolls across the continent.
The Anglicized form Maurice crossed to England with the Normans after 1066, and Maury emerged as an affectionate American shortening in the nineteenth century, particularly popular in Jewish and Catholic communities where Maurice was a common formal name. The diminutive has a warm, unpretentious quality — it sounds like a man who is good at poker, who tells a joke at exactly the right moment, who is, in the best sense of the word, a mensch. The name gained its most lasting late-twentieth-century cultural association through Maury Povich, the television host whose eponymous talk show became synonymous with paternity-test revelations and became a genuine fixture of American daytime television from the 1990s onward.
Maury is a name in the interesting position of being both vintage and underused, which makes it ripe for reconsideration. It has the compressed, friendly shape of names currently trending — Milo, Monty, Marty — while carrying real historical depth behind its simple syllables.