Is National Margaret Day the same as National Margarita Day?

No. National Margarita Day falls on 22 February and is about the cocktail, while National Margaret Day is 23 November and is about the name.

Is Daisy really a nickname for Margaret?

Possibly, but the link is hedged even in the dictionaries. Etymonline says only that the given name Daisy is said to have been originally a pet form of Margaret, and the French etymologists the OED quotes hold that the flower name marguerite comes from the sense pearl rather than from the personal name.

Who started National Margaret Day?

The earliest trace anyone can point to is an Internet Archive capture from 14 August 2022 of a holiday-listing page already carrying the 23 November date. Beyond that, no founder, proclamation or campaign has ever been documented.

National Margaret Day

Next celebratedMonday, November 23, 2026

St Margaret of Antioch's voice was among those St Joan of Arc was said to have heard, and in 1969 Rome removed her feast on the grounds that it is doubtful she existed. November 23 keeps the name's day.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 6, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATENovember 23

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYNames

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

~2022

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

Its whole documented history is one archived web page.

No founder, proclamation, campaign or establishment record has been documented for National Margaret Day. Its earliest traceable appearance is an Internet Archive capture from 14 August 2022 of a holiday-listing page that already carried the November 23 date.

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INTRO

The saint who may never have existed

St Margaret of Antioch, whose name National Margaret Day carries, was one of the 14 Holy Helpers and, in Britannica's words, one of the most venerated saints of the Middle Ages. Her voice was among those attested to have been heard by St Joan of Arc. The Roman Catholic Church has since taken her off its calendar.

In 1969 her July 20 feast was removed from the revised calendar, on the grounds that it is doubtful whether she ever existed. The veneration was real. The woman may not have been.

The name did not go with her. It belongs now to everyone who still carries it, and to a word that has been moving through English since about 1300 under at least two different meanings.

ORIGINS

Margaret Day history

INTRODUCTION

In a poem the Middle English Dictionary dates c1430, an English writer left a line the entry still quotes: "The daysye..is callyd margaret, So fayr, so goodly." It was not a joke about a woman. It was the ordinary word.

The dictionary keeps two separate headwords side by side, both borrowed from the same Old French source. One is margarīt(e, a pearl. The other is margaret(e, and its whole definition is two words: the daisy.

CHAPTER 01

The pearl that came from somewhere east

Both go back to a pearl. The name is first attested in English about 1300, from Old French, and behind it stand the Late Latin Margarita and the Greek margaritēs. There the trail goes cold: the Greek word's own origin is unknown.

The OED says only that it was probably adopted from some Oriental language. Beekes calls it an oriental loanword mostly assumed to be Iranian, and points at the Middle Persian marvarit, pearl.

English took the word seriously. A margarite could be a pearl, an oyster, or anything precious at all, and a corrupted conscience was a derk margarite. In the Wycliffite Bible the merchant who finds one goes and sells everything he has to buy it.

CHAPTER 02

The flower took a different road

The obvious story is that the daisy is named after women called Margaret. The French etymologists the OED quotes say otherwise: the flower sense of marguerite comes straight from the sense "pearl" and not from the personal name.

The English word daisy has nothing to do with either. It is Old English dæges eage, "day's eye", because the petals open at dawn and close at dusk. Of the given name Daisy, etymonline says only that it is said to have been originally a pet form of Margaret.

CHAPTER 03

A day with no author

Against all that documentation, the observance itself is a blank. No founder, no proclamation, no campaign, and nothing in the US federal record: a full-text search of the Federal Register returns nothing at all.

What exists instead is a date stamp. The Internet Archive holds a capture from 14 August 2022 of a holiday-listing page already headed with the name and the November 23 date, and it holds captures of that same site from May 2019.

TIMELINE

Timeline

A pearl of great price

The Wycliffite Bible renders the pearl of great price in Matthew 13:46 as "Oo preciouse margarite".

Lydgate names the flower

In the Troy Book, Lydgate has "þe sote lillye and þe margarete" unclose their tender white leaves.

The daisy is called margaret

An English poem states the equivalence outright: "The daysye..is callyd margaret, So fayr, so goodly."

English borrows marguerite

English adopts the French marguerite as a name for the common European daisy.

The first archived listing

The Internet Archive captures a holiday-listing page for the day on 14 August, already carrying the November 23 date.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Margaret Day

SPELLING

A name day is a day for a spelling, not a family.

The UK's Office for National Statistics counts the exact spelling written on the birth certificate, and states plainly that grouping names with similar pronunciation would change the rankings. Every figure on this page is a count of that one spelling, not of the French Marguerite, the Latin Margarita, or any other form a family might use.

REGISTERS

Margaret topped England and Wales three times

In the ONS historical table, which records the top 100 at ten-year intervals from 1904, Margaret is the number one girls' name in 1924, in 1934 and again in 1944. It appears in none of the intervals from 1974 to 2024.

OBSERVANCE

People keep it without being told to

With no organiser and no sponsor, the day still turns up on the date itself: a pet-goods business posted on 23 November 2024 to ask whether its followers knew, then tagged its followers by every short form of the name. That is what observance looks like for a day nobody runs.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Margaret Day by the Numbers

797,417: US births named Margaret, 1926-2025
19th: Margaret's rank, US girls, 1926-2025
158th: Margaret's US rank in the 2010s
1930: Margaret's last year in the US top five

GOOD TO KNOW

Four Margarets in the record

Margaret, the Pearl of Scotland

Born about 1045, probably in Hungary, she married Malcolm III Canmore and died in Edinburgh on 16 November 1093. Pope Innocent IV canonized her in 1250, and she is the patroness of Scotland as well as patron saint of widows, queens, nurses, large families, learning and ministry to the poor.

Margaret Mitchell, the 1937 Pulitzer

Gone With the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize in Novel, a category the board renamed Fiction in 1947. The board's own record of winners puts the prize in 1937.

Margaret Thatcher, 1979 to 1990

The UK government's own record of past prime ministers calls her the first female British Prime Minister and the longest serving PM for over 150 years. She was born in Grantham on 13 October 1925 and died in London on 8 April 2013.

Margaret H. Hamilton, Apollo's software

She led the team that wrote the on-board flight software for the Apollo command and lunar modules, and took the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the East Room on 22 November 2016. The citation credits her with asynchronous software, priority scheduling and human-in-the-loop decision capability.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Margaret Day

Ask which short form she actually answers to

Maggie, Marge, Margo, Margie and Rhetta are all in use, and most Margarets have a firm preference. Ask before you assume.

READ

Read the medieval entry for margaret

The Middle English Dictionary keeps the flower sense as its own headword, with the manuscript quotations underneath. It takes about a minute to read the whole entry.

PUT

Put daisies on the table

The flower and the name met in English in the 1400s, so a jar of them is the one decoration with a citation behind it. Cut them short and put them where people will ask.

LOOK

Look up where the name sits now

The Social Security Administration publishes its own ranked tables by decade and by century. Find the Margarets in your family and see which era each of them came from.

GIVE

Give something with a pearl in it

The name means pearl, which makes it the one gift with an etymology attached. It does not have to be expensive.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Margaret Day?

1 / 8

What does the name Margaret mean?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance with no legal standing found, so it is a normal working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

15sources

10primary records

4independently dated

Primary records

Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan2026-07

margaret(e n.

A Middle English word meaning simply the daisy, with two manuscript quotations.