Mai

The name

Mayy and Mayya are two forms of one name, the first shortened from the second. It belongs to the small class of very short female names that the classical poetry made permanent — Hind, Daʿd, Salmā, Laylā, Lubnā — names of one or two syllables that the metre took easily and that consequently outlived the women who bore them.

In the poetry

Mayya is best known as the woman of Dhū al-Rumma, Ghaylān ibn ʿUqba, whose verse is bound to the name closely enough that the lexica cite the two together. This is how most such names survive: not through the genealogies, which record men, but through the poems, which are the fullest record of women's names that early Arabic has.

What the lexicographers say

They give more than one account and prefer none:

• that Mayy is simply the shortened form of Mayya, itself an old proper name with no derivation assigned to it — what the grammarians call a murtajal, a name coined as a name rather than taken from a common word;
• that al-mayya names the female of the ape, and that women were named from it;
• that it is to be connected with māʾ, water, whose own root is m-w-h and whose plural is miyāh.

The reports sit side by side in the lexica, and this reference sets them out the same way rather than choosing between them.

A word that is not this name

Persian has may, wine, and it is written in Arabic exactly as this name is written. The lexica know the name only as the Arab woman's name set out above and derive it no such way. Modern writing that glosses Mayy as 'wine' has read a Persian word into an Arabic one that happens to share its spelling — the same mistake Hind attracts from al-Hind, 'India'.