Maria (given name)

Maria is a feminine given name. It is given in many languages influenced by Christianity.
It was used as the feminine form of the unrelated Roman name Marius (see Maria gens), and, after Christianity had spread across the Roman empire, it became the Latinised form of the name of Miriam: Mary, mother of Jesus.
Maria (Greek: Μαρία) is a form of the name used in the New Testament, standing alongside Mariam (Μαριάμ). It reflects the Syro-Aramaic name Maryam, which is in turn derived from the Biblical Hebrew name Miriam. As a result of their similarity and syncretism, the Latin original name Maria and the Hebrew-derived Maria combined to form a single name.
In Germanic languages, the name's usage is connected with the Germanic element *mar meaning "famous".
The name is also sometimes used as a male (middle) name. This was historically the case in many Central Europe countries and still is the case in countries with strong Catholic traditions, where it signified patronage of the Virgin Mary (French-speakers often did the same with Marie).
In the Arabic language the name Mariam (مريم) (also written: Meryem, Mariya) means either "white beautiful woman" or "white cow" or "a little bird with the same size as a pigeon", and it is quite popular in North Africa. One of the feminine Sahaba had the name Maria, Maria the Coptic.
Maria was a frequently given name in southern Europe even in the medieval period. In addition to the simple name, there arose a tradition of naming girls after specific titles of Mary, feast days associated with Mary and specific Marian apparitions (such as María de los Dolores, María del Pilar, María del Carmen etc., whence the derived given names of Dolores, Pilar, Carmen etc.). By contrast, in northern Europe the name only rose to popularity after the Reformation.
Because the name is so frequent in Christian tradition, a tradition of giving compound names has developed, with a number of such compounds themselves becoming very popular. Examples, among numerous others, include:
As a feminine given name, Maria ranked 109th in the United States as of 2015, down from rank 31 held during 1973–1975. The English form Mary was at rank 214 as of 2015, after a much steeper decline down from being raked first consistently during 1880–1968.
Spelling variants of Maria include: Mária (Hungarian, Slovakian), María (Greek, Icelandic, Spanish), Máire and Muire (Irish), Marya (transliterated from Cyrillic), Marija (Latvian, but also used in other Balto-Slavic languages) and Maria (Polish). Due to a very strong devotion of Irish and Polish Catholics to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a special exception is made for two other forms of her name – Muire and Maryja: no one else may take that name, similar to the way the name Jesus is not used in most languages. The English form Mary is derived via French Marie.
A great number of hypocoristic forms are in use in numerous languages. Cyrillic Maryam and Miriam have numerous variants, such as
The spelling in Semitic abjads is mrym: Aramaic ܡܪܝܡ, Hebrew מרים, Arabic مريم.
Cyrillic spellings are Мария (Maríja) (Russian, Bulgarian), Марыя (Marýja) (Belarusian), Марія (Maríja) (Ukrainian) and Марија (Marija) (Serbian, Macedonian).
Georgian uses მარიამ (Mariam) and მარია (Maria); Armenian has Մարիամ (Mariam).
Chinese has adopted the spelling 瑪麗 (simplified 玛丽, pinyin Mǎlì).
The variant Mariah (usually pronounced /məˈraɪə/) was rarely given in the United States prior to the 1990s, when it bounced in popularity, from rank 562 in 1989 to rank 62 in 1998, in imitation of the name of singer Mariah Carey (whose Vision of Love topped the charts in 1990).