A short modern form possibly related to Arley, an English surname meaning hare meadow or eagle wood.
Arli is a compact, warmly informal name with roots traceable to the Old English place-name element leah, meaning a woodland clearing or meadow, combined with earn or eorl — respectively "eagle" or "nobleman." The longer form Arley or Arleigh was used as both a place name and a family surname across the English Midlands; Arley, Warwickshire and Arley, Cheshire appear in Domesday Book records. From surname it became a given name in the American frontier tradition of adopting family names as first names, a pattern common throughout the nineteenth century.
Arli is the diminutive or affectionate shortening, the version that a community actually used rather than the version written in a ledger. As a given name Arli has a distinctly American vernacular quality — it sounds like something a grandmother in rural Arkansas or an old ranch hand in Oklahoma might have been called, a name worn smooth by daily use rather than ceremonial inscription. It belongs to a category of names — Harley, Marley, Carlie, Darley — that feel unpretentious and rooted, names that do not announce ambition so much as belonging.
In recent years this very quality has made such names appealing again after decades of fashion favoring the elaborate and exotic. Arli also functions comfortably as a gender-neutral name. It sits close to Arlo (a name with Norse and Old English roots that surged in popularity in the 2010s, partly through Arlo Guthrie and Arlo the Pixar dinosaur) without being identical, and it has a breezy, open-vowel ending that feels contemporary. A child named Arli carries a quiet piece of the English-speaking world's rural past into a decidedly modern present.