Origin and history of Moll

fem. proper name, Old English Maria, Marie, name of the mother of Jesus, from Latin Maria, from Greek Mariam, Maria, from Aramaic Maryam, from Hebrew Miryam, name of the sister of Moses (Exodus xv), a word of unknown origin, said to mean literally "rebellion."

The nursery rhyme "Mary had a Little Lamb" was written early 1830 by Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston and published September 1830 in "Juvenile Miscellany," a popular magazine for children. Mary Jane is 1921 as the proprietary name of a kind of low-heeled shoe worn chiefly by young girls, 1928 as slang for marijuana.

Mary Sue as a type of ludicrously idealized fictional character, originally in fanfiction based on the Star Trek television series, is attested by 1992, from the name of a character in the 1973 parody story A Trekkie's Tale. Attested in reference to other types of fiction by 1999. The male counterpart is a Gary Stu (2005) or a Marty Stu (2003).

Mary Sue is often easy to spot because she's impossible to miss. Put simply, Mary Sue is more: more charming, more belligerent, more understanding, more beautiful, more graceful, more eccentric, more spiritual, more klutzy. She has better hair, better clothes, better weapons, better brains, better sex, and better karma than anyone else. [Pat Pflieger, "Too Good to Be True: 150 Years of Mary Sue." 2001.]

a common 18c. colloquial term for "homosexual man" or "man who is deemed effeminate, a sissy," by 1707, perhaps 1690s. The fem. proper name Molly or Moll served as a type-name of a low-class girl or prostitute in old songs and ballads (perhaps in part for the sake of the easy rhymes).

But the colloquial word also resembles Latin mollis "soft," which also had been used classically in a specific pejorative sense in reference to men, "soft, effeminate, unmanly, weak," in Cicero, Livy, etc. A 1629 publication from the Catholic-Protestant theological disputes, "Truth's triumph ouer Trent," written in English with swerves into Latin, at one point describes the denizens of Hell as fideles fornicarios, adulteros, molles, and so forth, and molles is translated parenthetically in the text as "effeminate." Molly House as a term for a brothel frequented by gay men is attested in a court case from 1726.

1867, a member of a secret society in the mining districts of Pennsylvania (suppressed in 1876), which was named for an earlier secret society in Ireland (1843) formed to resist evictions and payment of rents and to terrorize those involved in the processes. From Molly (see Moll) + common Irish surname Maguire. There appears never to have been a specific Molly Maguire, but members were said to sometimes wear women's clothing as disguise, hence the name.