Short form of Arabella, from Latin 'orabilis' meaning 'yielding to prayer.' Popular in medieval Scotland.
Arabel is an ancient and quietly mysterious name, most likely derived from the Latin orabilis, meaning "easily entreated" or "responsive to prayer" — a virtue-name in the medieval Christian tradition that prized approachability and grace before God. Some etymologists have traced an alternative path through Arabella to an Old German root, and a few Scottish clan historians have linked it to the Norman-French Orable, a name appearing in twelfth-century chansons de geste as a Saracen queen who converts to Christianity for love — a suitably dramatic origin.
The name flourished in medieval and early modern Scotland and England, appearing in parish records as Arabel, Arabella, and Orabilia. It belonged to gentlewomen of the border counties, and the Jacobean noblewoman Arbella Stuart — cousin to James I and a genuine claimant to the English throne — kept the sound alive in the political imagination of the early seventeenth century. Her tragic imprisonment and death in the Tower of London gave the name an aura of romantic melancholy that Victorian novelists found irresistible.
Arabel (without the terminal -la) is the sparer, more medieval-feeling form, and it has attracted renewed attention from parents drawn to the current wave of vintage revival names. Where Arabella has climbed bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, Arabel remains genuinely uncommon — offering the same ancient texture and the same lilting three-syllable rhythm, but with an air of quiet originality that its fuller cousin can no longer quite claim.