Mavis comes from the Old French mauvis, the song thrush — a bird known for its rich, melodic song. The name was first popularised by the 1895 novel The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, whose heroine is Mavis Clare.
Mavis peaked in the U.S. in the 1920s, faded, and has been quietly returning in the 2020s.
Mavis does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Mavis reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.