American English word-name meaning spirit, nerve, and determination, originally from a New England soft drink brand.
Moxie has one of the most distinctly American etymological journeys of any name in use today. It began as a trade name: in 1876, Dr. Augustin Thompson of Lowell, Massachusetts, introduced a patent medicine he called Moxie Nerve Food, later reformulated as a carbonated beverage.
Thompson claimed the name derived from a Native American word, though this origin is disputed by etymologists. What is certain is that Moxie became one of the first nationally distributed soft drinks in the United States, and in New England it achieved a cultural saturation so complete that its name became a common noun. By the early 20th century, to have "moxie" meant to have nerve, guts, resilience, and resourceful courage — the exact qualities the drink's advertising had always promised to supply.
The word entered American slang fully detached from its commercial origins by the 1930s, and it has remained in use ever since as one of the most expressive single-word summaries of a particular American ideal: the scrappy, undaunted, get-back-up quality that turns obstacles into stories. It sat in this slang register — admired in a person, quoted in a sports column — for decades before parents began seeing it as a name. The naming shift accelerated in the 2000s and 2010s as parents increasingly chose names that were genuinely English words with unambiguous positive meanings.
Moxie as a given name is a bold choice, and intentionally so. It signals that a child is not named after a saint or an ancestor but after a quality — the quality of never being knocked down for long. It belongs to a tradition of virtue names, but where older virtue names (Patience, Prudence, Constance) counseled endurance, Moxie counsels action. It is, unmistakably, a name for someone who will make things happen.