Mai
Barely 130 people in Poland carry it, most of them women, so meeting a Mai would stick in the memory. A Latin name at root, read as "plum blossom" or "dance".
Mai Pronunciation
Mai is pronounced MAH-ee (/ˈmai/).
What Mai means
Where Mai comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Mai is short, and its story runs in two directions. The Latin thread leads to Maius, the month of May, named for the goddess Maia and tied since antiquity to spring and growth. The Japanese thread attaches the same sound to different characters. There 舞 means dance, while 梅 names the plum and its early blossom. The given meanings, plum blossom and dance, come from that second reading rather than from the Latin one.
The dance sense arrived through the Japanese character, not from Rome. That is worth keeping straight.
Mai has no diminutive and no variant, so nothing shortens it further. A Polish child who carries it meets it whole from the first day. On a class register it stands as itself, three letters wide, and its meaning reads as dance and plum blossom.
How many people are named Mai
1 in 189444 women in Poland is named Mai. 130 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #2926 among female names.
Mai as a middle name
Mai is a first name for 130 women in Poland and a middle name for another 105, a 55/45 split, almost evenly. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 653rd, between Luba (105) and Luise (104).
-
#651 Erwina105
-
#652 Luba105
-
#653 Mai105
-
#654 Luise104
-
#655 Tina104