Understanding "Maven"

On a recent stroll in San Francisco, I passed four empty storefronts, each with a “For Lease” sign posted by a commercial real-estate broker. The name on all the signs was the same: MAVEN.

If I'd ventured a little farther, I would have discovered even more "mavens," unrelated except for their names: Maven Recruiting Group, Maven wholesale furniture, and a telehealth nonprofit called the Maven Project. A few years ago, they'd have been joined by a Maven restaurant and a Maven car-sharing company, both of which closed recently. And I'm pretty sure that among the Bay Area's many software engineers there are some who use the Maven build automation tool, originally introduced by Apache Software Federation in 2004.

And that’s just my own vicinity: I also found Maven brand names in Texas, Atlanta, London, and Belfast, Northern Ireland, among other places.

What accounts for this word’s ubiquity? How did it come to be used as a brand name? And what does it mean?

Let’s take the last question first. Maven—it rhymes with “raven” and is sometimes spelled mavin or mayvin—is a Yiddish word that can be translated as “knowledgeable person,” “connoisseur,” or, less flatteringly, “know-it-all” or “self-proclaimed authority.” Its origin is a Hebrew word, mēbin, that means “a person with understanding.” The enigmatic rabbinical saying hamevin yavin can be translated as “He who understands will understand”--or, as Northeastern University Jewish studies professor Lori Lefkowitz told Moment magazine in 2018, “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you shouldn’t know what I’m talking about.”

The OED categorizes maven as “chiefly North American”; the dictionary’s earliest citation, from 1907, is from a Federation of American Zionists publication, The Maccabaean: “You will admit, will you not, that I am a good judge of a cantor.” “Yes, we admit that you are a mavin.”

Maven stayed mostly within the American Jewish community for much of the 20th century before finally joining other Yiddishisms—shtick, chutzpah, schmo—in mainstream culture. Its wider acceptance, beginning in the 1960s, can be credited to two influential writers and one catchy ad campaign.

The ad campaign was for New York–based Vita Food Products, which from 1964 through 1968 ran a series of radio ads in the New York area featuring actor Allen Swift as “The Beloved Herring Maven” who dispensed pickled-fish advice in a flavorful New Yawk accent. (Swift was also the voice of Mighty Mouse and most of the “Tom and Jerry” characters in Saturday-morning cartoons.)

A member of the Word Reference forum explained the significance of maven in the ads:

The herring maven knew everything there was to know about pickled herring (one might wonder how much there is to know). He was the expert, the authority, but made no claims to genius, etc. What made these ads work is that the comparatively few people who knew the word before and those to whom it was new came to the same conclusion about the meaning of the word--i.e., expert--which is precisely what the Vita Herring Company intended.

A decade or so after The Beloved Herring Maven ads left the airwaves, another New York institution took up the maven standard. William Safire, who had been a speechwriter for President Nixon, became the New York Times’s “On Language” columnist in 1979. Safire (1929–2009) “was widely called the ‘language maven,’” writes Barry Popik—a language maven himself—on the Big Apple website. Two collections of Safire’s columns had maven in their titles: Language Maven Strikes Again (1990) and Quoth the Maven (1993). Popik writes:

Safire was often called both a “maven” and a “pundit,” but he declared in 1985: “I am a language maven and a political pundit. Those two nouns, one of them relatively new to English ("maven"—ed.), have quite different meanings. A maven is a self-proclaimed expert.”

(Safire’s comment reminds us that English has imported many synonyms for “skilled person,” often from languages unrelated to English: guru and pundit from Hindi, ninja and sensei from Japanese, sherpa from Tibetan. See my 2013 column about the ascent of “sherpa.”)

Maven’s real tipping point was … well, The Tipping Point, the 2000 book by Malcolm Gladwell that asserted that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” Long before “influencer” became a job description, Gladwell divided influential people into three groups: connectors, salesmen, and—you guessed it—mavens. Mavens, Gladwell wrote, “are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know”:

The critical thing about Mavens is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too.

The Tipping Point became a best-seller and a favored reference in leadership seminars and marketing courses. It also enhanced our vocabulary. Not only did it make “tipping point”—a term used mostly by scientists beginning in the late 1950s—a household phrase, it educated thousands of readers about maven. Many of those readers went on to start companies that they named “Maven,” often explicitly acknowledging their debt to Gladwell and The Tipping Point.

Take Jungmaven, a Seattle-based company that manufactures and sells clothing made from hemp fabric. The company’s founder, Robert Jungmann, added maven to the first syllable of his surname to create the brand name. “It made perfect sense to me,” he told a a retail-industry publication in 2018:

I was reading “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell during a long rainy September in Mal Pais, Costa Rica and the word MAVEN is used to identify the ultimate trendsetter. I was already designing a line and was thinking to name it “JUNG” (pronounced young). The combination of the two suggests new trend [sic].

Other company founders also appear to have made the cognitive jump from maven’s original meaning—“one who understands”—to “ultimate trendsetter.” A scan of the 288 live trademarks in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database reveals, among others, The Jewelry Maven, Maven Cosmetics, Cannabis Maven, Maven Beauty Company, Mavenlink software. The pharmaceutical Mavenclad received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in 2019 as a treatment for multiple sclerosis; the -clad suffix is derived from the drug’s generic name, cladribine. There’s even a Sushi Maven, which sells kosher ingredients for Japanese restaurants: a cultural and linguistic hybrid that might have pleased The Beloved Herring Maven.

Maven has even found its way into space. NASA’s Mars orbiter, launched in November 2013, continues to gather information about the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere. The orbiter’s name, MAVEN, is a backronym for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN.

One more sign of maven’s assimilation: It’s now a baby name in the U.S. and the U.K. Several baby-name sites claim that Maven is “a unisex name,” although the high-profile examples I’ve found are female: American comedian Tracy Morgan’s daughter, born in 2013; and English TV presenter Rachel Riley’s daughter, born in 2019. The Namerology NameGrapher, which draws on U.S. baby-name statistics, shows only female “Mavens,” with a steep popularity spike in 2021. (For what it’s worth, maven is a masculine noun in Yiddish and Hebrew, which have gendered grammars.) Comments on various message boards suggest that the baby name “Maven” may be influenced by “Maeve,” a traditional Irish girl’s name that rhymes with “save”--and a company called Maeven Box, which sells bridal products, suggests that the conflation goes beyond baby naming.

The real proof of maven’s success may be its surfacing in that prime cultural signifier: rap lyrics. In 2009 Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, released “Amazing,” which includes this line:

I’m a monster, I’m a maven / I know this world is changing

… in which the rhyme for “I’m a maven” is “never gave in.”

Can a monster also be a maven? Are mavens monsters? The ancient saying seems to fit here: If you understand, you’ll understand.