The day's eye: a storybook that opens up for Daisy

Where the name Daisy comes from

The word goes back to Old English dæges ēage, "day's eye". The common daisy folds its white petals over its yellow centre at night and opens them again in the morning, so to the people who named it, the flower looked like an eye waking up with the sun. Chaucer was already praising the "eye of the day" in the fourteenth century, which makes Daisy one of the oldest flower words still in everyday English.

As a girl's name, Daisy took a slightly roundabout route. In the nineteenth century it was a popular pet form of Margaret, because the French Marguerite is also the word for the daisy. Over time it stood on its own, and the late-Victorian enthusiasm for flower names helped it along. By the 1890s the music-hall song "Daisy Bell", the one about a bicycle built for two, had made it famous enough to be hummed all over the country. In 1961 that same song became one of the first pieces of music ever sung by a computer.

In literature Daisy has two well-known sides: Henry James's spirited Daisy Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald's dreamy Daisy Buchanan. In the last few decades the name has had a strong revival in England and Wales, where it has stayed a familiar choice in the national baby-name lists. It sits comfortably among the gentle, old-fashioned names British parents have come back to: short, warm and a little bit country garden.

The flower itself has a long history in English folklore. Children have been making daisy chains on summer lawns for centuries, splitting each stem with a thumbnail and threading the next flower through. There's an old country saying that spring hasn't truly arrived until you can put your foot on seven daisies at once, and the petal game "he loves me, he loves me not" is usually played with a daisy too. Few names come with that many small rituals already attached, which is part of why Daisy feels so much at home in a children's story.

In the UK there is no name day for Daisy, so the natural day to celebrate is her birthday, or the first warm morning in spring when the lawns go white.

Ways to say Daisy

• Daisy — The full name, and already as short as most nicknames. It's the form that goes on the cover and the one the story uses in moments that matter.
• Dais / Daise — A quick, one-syllable version for calling her in from the garden or shouting from the bottom of the stairs.
• Daisy-May — A playful double-barrelled form many families use as an affectionate pet name, even when May isn't her middle name.
• Daisy-Doo — A silly, sing-song version for the youngest Daisys, usually heard at bath time or bedtime.
• Day — A short, quiet form some families use, and a neat nod to the name's original meaning, "day's eye".