French variant of Corinne, from Greek 'korē' meaning maiden or girl.
Corrine is a variant spelling of Corinne, which derives from the ancient Greek Korinna — itself a diminutive of kore, meaning maiden or girl, the same root that gives us Persephone's epithet as the Maiden of the underworld. The original Corinna was a celebrated lyric poet of ancient Boeotia, said to have been a contemporary and rival of Pindar in the fifth century BCE, and according to ancient tradition she bested him in competition five times. Whether or not the stories are apocryphal, her name carried significant literary prestige into the modern era.
The name's most influential modern appearance came in 1807, when Germaine de Staël published her novel Corinne, ou l'Italie. De Staël's Corinne is a half-Scottish, half-Italian poet and improvvisatrice — a woman of genius who is destroyed by the conflict between her creative freedom and the social constraints imposed on women in love. The novel was a sensation across Europe, and it made the name Corinne synonymous with romantic female brilliance and tragic passion.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning drew on de Staël's Corinne when writing Aurora Leigh, and the novel influenced generations of women writers who saw in Corinne a mirror of their own thwarted ambitions. The spelling Corrine — with the double r softened by a single n — became the preferred American vernacular form in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, common in French-influenced Louisiana and across the broader South. It reached peak popularity in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, carried by the jazz standard 'Corrine, Corrina,' recorded by dozens of artists from Bo Diddley to Bob Dylan. The name now reads as quietly vintage, waiting for a full revival.