Née is a small French word meaning ‘born,’ used in English after a married woman’s name to show the family name she had at birth — the name before she took her husband’s. You write it like this: Mary Chen, née Wang. It is formal and mostly written: wedding papers, death notices, life stories, name lists. In everyday talk people would just say ‘her maiden name was Wang’ or ‘she was born Wang.’ Because née is the feminine form in French, English uses it for women. French also has masculine né, but English almost never bothers with it. Née is not a first name and not a verb; it is a little label inside a name.