Mhairi

Mhairi is the Scottish Gaelic vocative form of Màiri, itself the Gaelic adaptation of Mary, which derives from the Hebrew name Miryam, whose precise meaning is debated but may relate to "beloved" or "sea of bitterness." In Scottish Gaelic, the vocative case was traditionally used when addressing someone directly, so Mhairi originally functioned as the spoken form of the name rather than the citation form. Despite this grammatical origin, Mhairi has come to be used as a given name in its own right, particularly in Scotland. It is pronounced roughly "VAR-ee" due to the lenition of the initial consonant, and it is closely related to Màiri and the wider family of Mary variants found across European traditions.