Arabella (given name)

This article is about the given name. For other uses, see Arabella (disambiguation).

Arabella is a female given name of Scottish origin.

Origin and history

The earliest known namesake: Arabella de Leuchars (c.1135-1203): was a granddaughter of the Scottish king William the Lion; the earliest English namesake was the granddaughter of Arabella de Leuchars: Arabella de Quincy (c.1186-1258), the daughter of Saer de Quincy, 1st Earl of Winchester. Typically of medieval bearers of the name both these Arabellas are also documented as Orabel[la] and Orabilia, and in documents which Latinize names as Orabilis. A Latin construction which suffixes orare with ābilis - thus interpretable as "given to prayer" or "entreatable" - Orabilis has been suggested as the root of the name Arabella and its variants. However Orabilis may have been a purely speculative Latinized form rather than the name's true root, and usage of Arabella and its variants long being confined to Great Britain with no equivalent names in evident use elsewhere would argue for a British origin such as the Celtic òr a bheul "golden mouth", the Scottish equivalent of Bel-óir the Irish epithet for Saint Gregory the Great. Another theory suggests that the name Arabella - like the name Annabel - is a Scottish development of Amabel, whose ultimate root is the Latin amabilis (lovable), which name had passed to Great Britain via usage in France.

The first high-profile English bearer of the name was Royal claimant Arabella Stuart (1575-1615) also referred to as Arbella. The name Arabella remained rare in England until the Restoration ushered in a fashion for ornate names: Arabella Fermor (1696–1737) was a celebrated London beauty and while her highest profile evocation as the heroine of the 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope was under the name "Belinda" Pope did introduce the 1717 edition of his poem with a dedication "To Mrs Arabella Fermor".

Remaining fairly popular in Georgian and Victorian Britain - more so in England than its native Scotland - the name Arabella began to decline in popularity in the late 1800s, bottoming out in the 1940s, when there were only 15 recorded births with that name. The name has seen a steady resurgence in popularity since the 1990s, reaching #95 most given name for newborn girls in England and Wales in 2015.

Despite the potential for being valued as a US heritage name - being the name of the flagship of the Winthrop Fleet (see Arbella) - Arabella was long in disfavor in the United States. A rare high-profile American bearer of the name was Arabella Mansfield (née Babb) (1846-1911) the first female to pass a United States bar examination: Mansfield's birth name was Belle Aurelia Babb and she began utilizing Arabella as her first name in her first year of law school in 1862. Just ranking in the Top 1000 most given names for American newborn girls in the 1880s - the median ranking for the name Arabella from that decade's respective yearly tallies being #969 - the name Arabella became progressively rarer in the United States until an incline from circa 1990 led to a Top 1000 re-entry on the tally of the most given names for American newborn girls for the year 2006 which ranked the name Arabella at #653: the name has continued to accrue favor ranking on the tally of the most given names for American newborn girls for the year 2014 at #174 evincing 1894 instances.

People named Arabella

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Fictional characters named Arabella

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