Arlowe is a variant of Arlo, an English name with uncertain roots, often linked to fortified hill or barberry tree.
Arlowe is a feminized or softened variant of Arlo, a name whose etymology has been the subject of genuine scholarly curiosity. The most widely accepted theory traces Arlo to the Anglo-Saxon place name Harlow, meaning 'army hill' (from 'here,' army, and 'hlaw,' hill or mound), which appeared in the Domesday Book and survived as an English surname before making the journey into given-name territory.
Edmund Spenser used 'Arlo Hill' as a setting in The Faerie Queene, giving the syllable a literary glow that would persist. The twentieth century brought the name its most famous bearer in Arlo Guthrie, the folk singer whose 1967 talking-blues epic 'Alice's Restaurant' made him an icon of the counterculture and fixed 'Arlo' in the American imagination as a name of gentle, sardonic independence. The addition of the terminal '-e' in Arlowe softens the name visually and phonetically, gesturing toward the French-inflected femininity of names like Marlowe and Harlow while preserving the original's rugged Anglo-Saxon bones.
Marlowe, of course, is the surname of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, and Harlow echoes the golden-age Hollywood actress Jean Harlow — so Arlowe finds itself in distinguished company. It is a name for a moment when parents are drawn to names that feel simultaneously rooted and fresh, historically textured but unencumbered by heavy tradition: a name that can belong entirely to the person who wears it.