Scottish diminutive of Margaret, from Greek 'margarites' meaning pearl.
Maysie is a Scottish diminutive form of Margaret, operating through a chain of affectionate transformations: Margaret became Meg, Meg became Meggie and Maggie, and in Scottish vernacular those softened further into Maisie and Maysie. Margaret itself derives from the Greek margaritēs, meaning "pearl," which passed through Latin into virtually every European language and became one of the most enduring names in Western history. Queens, saints, and poets bore it across a thousand years.
Maysie represents the name in its most intimate, local form — stripped of all formality, kept warm by the hearth. The variant Maisie found its most celebrated literary home in Henry James's 1897 novel What Maisie Knew, in which a sharp-eyed young girl navigates the wreckage of her parents' bitter divorce. James's Maisie is precociously perceptive, morally serious beneath her childish exterior — a portrait that gave the name unexpected psychological depth.
More recently, Scottish author Jacqueline Winspear's beloved detective series features Maisie Dobbs, a working-class woman who becomes a private investigator in interwar Britain, further cementing the name's association with quiet intelligence and resilience. Maysie's spelling with a Y rather than an I gives it a slightly more individual flavor than the more common Maisie, and both have benefited from the broader revival of vintage nickname-names — Nellie, Millie, Sadie, Hattie. Maysie feels at once old-fashioned and effortlessly current, a small name with a full life already lived inside it.