Variant of Annabel, likely a combination of Anna ('grace') and the French 'belle' ('beautiful').
Annabell is a name built from two of the most beautiful words in the European tradition: Anna, the Latinized form of the Hebrew Hannah (meaning "grace" or "God has favored me"), and Belle, the French word for "beautiful." Whether the second element derives from the Old French belle or from the Scots Gaelic amiable, meaning "lovable," the result is effectively the same: a name that means something close to "graceful beauty" or "beautiful grace" — an aspiration as old as any civilization's concept of the ideal. The name's most haunting literary home is in Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 poem "Annabel Lee," his final complete poem and widely considered among the most lyrical elegies in the English language.
Poe's narrator mourns a maiden "in a kingdom by the sea" whose love, he insists, was so pure that the angels themselves were jealous. The poem transformed Annabel — and its variant spellings — into a name associated with romantic intensity, melancholy beauty, and a love that refuses to yield to death. This literary weight gives Annabell a depth unusual in names that appear, at first glance, merely decorative.
The spelling Annabell, with its doubled n absorbed smoothly into the whole, feels particularly organic — the two halves fused rather than hyphenated. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the full form Annabelle was fashionable in Southern American communities, lending the name a warmth associated with a particular kind of gracious hospitality. It has cycled back into contemporary favor, appealing to parents who want something undeniably feminine but architecturally substantial — a name with a poem inside it.