Literary name from Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers,' likely a whimsical diminutive of Harriet.
Arrietty owes its existence to one of the great works of British children's literature: Mary Norton's *The Borrowers*, published in 1952. Norton invented the name for her tiny heroine Arrietty Clock, a Borrower — one of a race of miniature people who live beneath the floorboards and "borrow" small objects from the human inhabitants above. Norton likely derived Arrietty from Harriet, an English form of the Old French Henriette, itself from the Germanic *Heimrich* meaning "home ruler."
By softening and elongating it, Norton gave the name a Victorian lace-work quality perfectly suited to a girl who lives inside the walls of a country house. For decades Arrietty was almost exclusively a literary name, recognized only by devotees of Norton's series. It re-entered wider cultural consciousness in 2010 when Studio Ghibli released *Karigurashi no Arrietty* (known in English as *The Secret World of Arrietty*), Hiromasa Yonebayashi's luminous adaptation that introduced the name to a global audience.
The film's visual tenderness — dewdrops the size of swimming pools, sugar cubes as furniture — gave the name a fairy-tale shimmer it has never quite lost. Today Arrietty occupies a rare category: a wholly invented name that has accumulated enough cultural history to feel genuinely antique.