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Molly

proper nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmɒ.li//
  • United States//ˈmɑ.li//

A diminutive of Mary or, less often, Margaret.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A diminutive of Mary or, less often, Margaret.

    "My name's Molly. It is an old-fashioned name, and I was christened Mary. But Papa likes Molly." "That's right. Keep to the good old fashions, dear." "Well, I must say I think Mary is prettier than Molly, and quite as old a name, too," said Mrs Hamley. "I think it was," said Molly, lowering her voice, and dropping her eyes, "because mamma was Mary, and I was called Molly when she lived."

    But Mother and Father and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle and Aunty couldn't very well call out "Millicent Margaret Amanda" every time they wanted her, so they shortened it to "Milly-Molly-Mandy" which is quite easy to say.

  2. 2

    A female given name from Hebrew.

Etymology

From Moll, diminutive lambdacism of Mary + -y.

noun

  1. 1

    historicalA Molly Maguire.

  2. 2

    Variant of mollyslangAlternative letter-case form of molly: the crystalline or powdered form of MDMA.

Forms

plural
Mollies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).