MG Logo and What MG Stands For

What does the MG logo stand for?

MG stands for Morris Garages, and the MG logo puts those two letters inside an octagon. Morris Garages was William Morris’s car sales and service business in Oxford, England, and Cecil Kimber, its general manager from 1922, turned the name into a car marque. MG’s own website says Kimber picked the initials as a nod to his boss. Morris owned the business, but he did not found MG: Kimber built the first cars. In a car context, MG has nothing to do with Mg, the chemical symbol for magnesium.

Term	Answer
MG car meaning	The full form of MG, the car brand, is Morris Garages
MG logo	The initials MG inside an eight-sided frame
MG car logo meaning	The initials of Morris Garages in a plain eight-sided frame

Is MG really short for Morris Garages?

Yes. The meaning of the MG car name was spelled out on the first cars. Kimber joined the Longwall Street dealership as sales manager in 1921. His first sporting cars were modified Morris Oxford and Cowley models, known as Kimber Specials and badged “MG Super Sports.” Those early cars wore both Morris and MG badges, so buyers could see exactly what the initials stood for.

MG became a company name later. The business traded as The M.G. Car Company from March 1928 and was incorporated in July 1930.

The start date is less tidy. MG dates its start to 1924, though an octagon-badged MG appears in an Oxford newspaper as early as November 1923.

What does the octagon mean?

As far as the record shows, the eight-sided frame is simply a setting for the initials, not a coded symbol. It appears with MG in an Oxford newspaper in November 1923, and Morris Garages registered the MG Octagon as a trademark on 1 May 1924. The round “Morris Oxford” badge was in use at the same time.

Who drew it is uncertain. One MG history site credits Edmund “Ted” Lee, an accountant at Morris Garages, with the sketch, made when Kimber wanted a mark for stationery and advertising. No second source confirms it.

Other versions of the MG logo meaning come from marketing. MG Vietnam calls the shape a symbol of good fortune and compares the top of the “M” to an open car door, but nothing shows the badge was designed with either idea in mind. MG’s own site says the MG symbol has changed little in almost a century. That holds for the shape. The colors, frame and lettering have all changed.

MG logo history: every version since the 1920s

1. 1924
2. 1927
3. 1952
4. 1962
5. 1990
6. 2011
7. 2021

The MG logo has been an octagon since 1923–24, and the logo of MG kept that shape under every owner that followed. What changed was the color, the frame around it and the finish of the letters. The 1923–24, 1990, 2011 and 2021 dates are well documented. The 1927, 1952 and 1962 boundaries come mostly from logo reference sites, so treat them as approximate. The owner column shows who controlled MG while each version was in use.

Version	Years	Owner	Looks like
First octagon	Nov 1923 (newspaper); trademark 1 May 1924	Morris Garages (William Morris)	MG in an eight-sided frame; no verified image
Circular Super Sports badge	1924 to about 1927	Morris Garages	Round blue enamel disc reading “The M.G. / Morris Oxford / Super Sports”
Brown and gold	About 1927 to 1952	Morris Garages; The M.G. Car Company (1930); Morris Motors / Nuffield (1935)	Brown frame and letters on a gold field
Black and white	1952 to about 1962	BMC (1952)	Flat, no gradient
Black crest	About 1962 to 1990	BMC; BMH (1966); British Leyland (1968); Rover Group (1986); British Aerospace (1988)	Red and silver badge inside a black shield
Crest dropped	1990 to 2010	British Aerospace; BMW (1994); MG Rover (2000); Nanjing Automobile (2005); SAIC (2007)	Burgundy and gold, silver outline
Silver 3D	2011 to 2021	SAIC	Glossy silver metal look, plus a black MG logotype
Flat red	2021 to today	SAIC	Solid red, no shading

1924 to about 1927: the circular Super Sports badge

This MG logo is a round blue enamel disc: “The M.G.” runs across the top, “Super Sports” across the bottom, and an inner ring reads “Morris Oxford” around a small silver and red Morris crest. The wording follows from the cars themselves, which were modified Morris Oxfords.

Logo histories often call this the “pre-octagon” logo. That is wrong. The octagon was already in print by November 1923 and trademarked in May 1924, so the two badges were used side by side. MG Vietnam’s claim that the early badge marks the Abingdon factory doesn’t fit either, because MG only moved to Abingdon in 1929.

About 1927 to 1952: the brown and gold octagon

From about 1927 the octagon appears in brown and gold. This is the version most often shown as the Morris Garages logo: a dark brown frame with a thin inner line, a pale gold field, and brown letters as thick as the frame. According to the MG Car Club, every MG carried the octagon by the end of 1927.

The same year, MG moved to its own factory on Edmund Road in Cowley, but no source ties the redraw to that move. MG remained William Morris’s personal property, as The M.G. Car Company from 1930, until it passed to Morris Motors on 1 July 1935 and became part of the Nuffield Organization.

1952 to about 1962: the black-and-white octagon

A flat black-and-white version dates from the 1950s. It has a black frame, a white inner outline and black letters on white, with sharp corners and no gradient. If you need an MG logo in black and white, this is the historical one.

Logo sites date it from 1952 to about 1962, while Logopedia labels its file 1952–1990, so the end date is soft. 1952 is also the year Morris Motors and Austin merged to form the British Motor Corporation (BMC), MG’s new parent. The dates line up, but no source says the merger caused the redesign.

About 1962 to 1990: silver and red on a black crest

From the early 1960s the badge turned red and silver and sat inside a black, shield-shaped crest with a double white-and-black outline. MG Vietnam says red joined the badge in the early 1960s, and logo sites give 1962. This is the MG car logo of the MGB years.

It was introduced under BMC. BMC became British Motor Holdings (BMH) after merging with Jaguar in 1966, and BMH joined Leyland in 1968 to form British Leyland Motor Corporation. The Abingdon factory closed on 24 October 1980, and the last car built there was an MGB. The crest lasted longer still: British Leyland became Rover Group in 1986, British Aerospace bought it in 1988, and the crest stayed until 1990.

1990 to 2010: the octagon without the crest

In 1990 the MG logo lost its crest. The badge was redrawn with slightly arched sides, a burgundy-brown frame and letters, a gold field of fine stripes and a thin silver outline. Wikipedia uses it as the MG Cars logo in its infobox, captioned “Logo used from 1990 to 2010.”

It served five owners. Rover Group belonged to British Aerospace until 1994 and to BMW from 1994 to 2000. BMW then sold the business, which became MG Rover Group. MG Rover went into receivership in April 2005, and Nanjing Automobile bought the MG marque on 22 July 2005. SAIC Motor took over when Nanjing merged into it on 26 December 2007, so the 1990 badge carried on into the SAIC years.

2011 to 2021: the silver 3D octagon

MG Motor UK launched a new corporate identity in early 2011, and with it a wider emblem in glossy silver 3D metal. A separate black “MG” logotype went with it; the image above shows the emblem alone. Some logo sites date this MG Motor logo (also written “MG Motors logo”) to 2010, but Wikipedia and the 2011 launch coverage support 2011.

MG UK said the new identity “links MG’s famous past with an exciting future.” It arrived more than three years after SAIC took control, so it can’t be tied to the change of owner.

2021 to today: the new MG logo

Yes, MG has a new logo. MG introduced the flat red octagon in 2021 and rolled it out market by market, so launch dates vary by country. French magazine L’Argus reported in April 2021 that the shading was gone, the lines were thinner and the letters larger.

The result is solid red with no gradients or metal effects, and it is the MG logo in use today. Red has been part of the badge since the early 1960s, and in 2021 it became the only color. Sites that name one exact launch day disagree with each other, so the year is the safe answer.

Do all MG cars wear the same badge?

Most do. The MG car logo is the MG octagon, from the Midget and the MGB to today’s models, and current cars in the UK and Europe carry the flat red version. But the MG logo on a car is not always the only emblem, and SAIC’s other car brands have names of their own:

• Classic cars: the MG car emblem on an older car can help date it, since each era had its own colors and frame (see the table above).
• Outside the UK and Europe: in most other markets, MG vehicles carry a “Brit Dynamics” emblem as part of a marketing campaign, Wikipedia notes.
• Sister brands: MG is a division of SAIC’s passenger-car business alongside Roewe, Maxus, IM Motors and Rising Auto. Those are separate brands, so their cars are not MG models.

MG logo colors, font and PNG

Today’s MG logo is one color: red. Over the years the MG car symbol has been blue, brown and gold, black and white, red and silver on black, burgundy and gold, silver, and finally red. Those colors come from the badges shown above, not from an official MG color guide, so no hex code is given here.

No official typeface name for the letters appears in the sources we checked. Logopedia describes the 2021 lettering as custom, so any font sold as “the MG font” is a look-alike.

What the download button gives you:

• MG logo PNG: the current flat red badge.
• Background: transparent, inside and outside the frame, so it works on light and dark pages.
• Older versions: the badges above are for reference and are not part of the download.

MG is a British marque, and you can find it with other sports car brands and red car logos.