Compound of Latin 'clarus' (bright) and 'bella' (beautiful), meaning bright and beautiful.
Claribel is a name composed of two Latin elements of unimpeachable elegance: "clarus" (clear, bright, famous, illustrious) and "bella" (beautiful) — yielding something like "brilliantly beautiful" or "famous beauty." The name has a Renaissance feeling to it, belonging to the tradition of Latinate coinages that flowered in Italian and Spanish courts and found their way into English through literature and courtly fashion. It has the quality of a name invented by a poet rather than inherited from a saint — a name that seems to exist on a stage or in a garden.
Alfred Lord Tennyson gave Claribel one of its most resonant literary moments in his very first published collection (1830), where "Claribel: A Melody" established the name as associated with lyrical sadness and romantic beauty. Shakespeare had earlier used the name in "The Tempest" for Alonso's daughter, the offstage Queen of Tunis — a figure present only in her absence, described as so beautiful that she drew her father across treacherous seas. The name also appears in Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene," cementing its place in the canon of Elizabethan and Romantic literary imagination.
In American usage, Claribel had a small vogue in the 19th and early 20th centuries, appealing to families who wanted femininity with classical weight. Claribel Cone, the Baltimore art collector who with her sister Etta assembled one of the greatest private collections of Matisse and Picasso in the world, gave the name a connection to early modernist patronage and genuine cultural power. Today Claribel reads as an exquisite rarity — more fragile than Clara, more distinctive than Isabel, carrying centuries of literary perfume without the dustiness of names that merely aged out of fashion.