Maddox
Meaning of Maddox
Maddox, a robust appellation ultimately traced to the Welsh patronymic “ap Madoc”—“son of Madoc,” with Madoc itself stemming from the medieval Welsh root mad (“fortunate, beneficent”)—embodies the old Latin adage nomen omen, suggesting that a name can foreshadow character; indeed, the legendary Madoc ap Owain Gwynedd, reputed in Renaissance chronicles to have sailed trans-Atlantic “ante Christophorum Columbum,” lends the name an aura of exploratory audacia. As a surname gradually promoted to given-name status in the Anglophone world, Maddox remained statistically quiescent until the early twenty-first century, when the high-profile adoption of Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt (2002) functioned as a cultural catalyst; U.S. birth-record data reveal an exponential ascent from a mere fifteen occurrences in 2000 to a zenith of 3,043 in 2017, after which the curve, like a tidal wave gently recoiling, settled into the low-two-thousand range while maintaining a respectable rank near the 170th percentile. Semantically fortified by connotations of good fortune and reinforced by cinematic celebrity, the name today offers prospective parents a synthesis of Celtic heritage, modern media resonance, and the subtle gravitas of a consonant-rich phonetic profile—an onomastic choice that is at once classicus et contemporaneus.
Pronunciation
English
- Pronunced as MAD-uhks (/ˈmædəks/)
U.S. Popularity Chart
States Popularity Chart
Notable People Named Maddox
| George Ouzounian, known as Maddox, is an American blogger, YouTuber, and author who gained early internet fame with The Best Page in the Universe and wrote the 2006 New York Times bestseller The Alphabet of Manliness. |
