In present-day English, Maine is almost always a proper name. It names the northeasternmost state of the United States, and also a former province of northwestern France whose old capital was Le Mans. Speakers often treat the two as the same word used twice. That may be right. It may not. The origin of the word maine is still an open argument.
The everyday word main, meaning principal or the chief part of something, is a homophone. In the seventeenth century maine was also an ordinary spelling of that older English word. The colonial place-name sits on top of that spelling, which is one reason the history is hard to pin down.
The name on the grant
English first used Maine as a colonial place-name in 1622. On 10 August of that year the Council for New England granted a coastal tract to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason and recorded their intention to call it the Province of Maine. The spelling was not yet fixed. Mayne turns up in later papers.
In 1639 Charles I confirmed Gorges’s claim in a royal charter and went out of his way to lock the label down. The grant speaks of a portion of the main land and orders that it be called the Province or County of Mayne, and not known by any other name. In 1665 commissioners of Charles II had that form entered in the records. By then the coast had already worn other English labels, including New Somersetshire, so the insistence is itself evidence: the crown wanted one name, even if nobody wrote down why that name had been chosen.
A sailor’s report from the same decade helps the mainland reading. Christopher Levett, writing of a failed settlement near present-day Cape Elizabeth in the mid-1620s, described a bay between the Maine and islands about a mile and a half offshore. He may have been using the new proper name, or a nautical common noun for the continental shore. Early documents sometimes write Maynland in the same contrast of coast against islands.
Mainland, or a French namesake
Two explanations still have serious defenders.
The first treats Maine as a toponym built from English main in the sense of mainland. By the 1540s that noun could mean a continuous stretch of land or water. In sailor’s English it could mean the ocean, and in the phrase Spanish Main it meant the South American shore as opposed to the Caribbean islands. New England’s coast, thick with islands, invited the same contrast. English fishermen are often credited with calling the shore the main before the 1622 grant made a proper name of it. The account fits the period vocabulary. It does not prove that Gorges or Mason chose the word for that reason. Mason had served in the Orkney Islands, whose largest island is Mainland, but he did not need Orkney in order to know the English word.
The second explanation points across the Channel. Historic Maine in France, south of Normandy, was a medieval county and later a province. French colonists under Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, settled Saint Croix Island in 1604 and called the wider region Acadia. Some dictionaries say those explorers transferred the French provincial name to this stretch of North America. Documentary proof of that transfer has not turned up. Gorges had fought in France in the 1590s, but the campaign that won him a knighthood was at Rouen, not in Maine, and there is no record that he ever served in the province. In 2001 the Maine legislature, in a Franco-American Day resolution, nonetheless declared the French province the state’s namesake. Historians have not followed the decree. The transfer is plausible as a colonial habit. It remains unproven.
Other stories have been tried and dropped. The state is not named for Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s French-born wife; Maryland is the colony that carries her name, and a private-estate version of the same idea has no better paperwork. A Dorset village near Broadmayne, spelled Maine or Meine at various times and not far from Gorges family country, has been offered as a local English source. That too is possible and unproven.
What the French name actually is
If the American name does come from France, it does not come from a river, despite a common mix-up. The French province takes its name from the Gaulish people known as the Aulerci Cenomani. Late antique and early medieval Latin records have forms such as in Cinomanico in the sixth century and in pago Celmanico in 765. Old French Cemaine followed. Speakers then rebracketed the first syllable as the demonstrative ce, this, and by the twelfth century the ce- had fallen away, leaving Maine, often with the article as Le Maine. The city of Le Mans is a parallel leftover of the same tribal name, from forms such as Cenomannis through Cemans. That is morphology worth keeping: not a suffix added in English, but a French reanalysis that stripped a syllable.
A river called the Maine flows through Angers into the Loire. That hydronym comes from an older Maienne, Latin Meduāna, and is a doublet of Mayenne. It is not the source of the provincial name, even though popular summaries sometimes fuse the two. Unrelated lookalikes include the Irish given name Maine, from Old Irish, and the River Maine in County Kerry, from Irish An Mhaing.
After the label stuck
Once English maps had Maine, the word’s political sense shifted with the ground it covered. The 1622 grant was later split. Massachusetts took control of the northern settlements in the 1650s, and a 1691 patent folded the whole of present-day Maine into Massachusetts as York County. District of Maine remained the everyday label until 1820, when the territory entered the Union as the twenty-third state. The proper name then grew ordinary English derivatives, among them Mainer for an inhabitant.
None of that later history decides the first naming. In early modern English, maine was how you could spell the old native word for strength and, later, for the principal land in sight of islands. That native word goes back to Old English mægen, Mercian megen, from Germanic maginam, power, a relative of the verb that gives modern English may and might, and of Old High German megin and Old Norse megenn. Whether Gorges’s province borrowed that common noun, or borrowed a French tribal name that had already lost a syllable, is still not known. The charter of 1639 closed the question of what to call the place. It left the etymology open.