Blend of Jana (from Jane, 'God is gracious') and Lee ('meadow').
Janalee is a compound feminine name that braids together two of the most widely traveled names in the Indo-European naming world. Jana is the feminine form of Jan or John, descending from the Hebrew Yohanan — "YHWH is gracious" — a name so foundational to Christian tradition that it shaped naming conventions across virtually every European language: John in English, Jean in French, Giovanni in Italian, Juan in Spanish, Ivan in Russian, Sean in Irish. Jana is the form most common in Slavic languages, German, and Dutch, carrying a clean, continental sound that traveled well into English-speaking communities through immigrant families.
The Lee element derives from the Old English "lēah," meaning a woodland clearing or meadow — one of the most common place-name elements in England, surviving in dozens of village names ending in -ley, -leigh, and -lee. As a personal name, Lee was long masculine in America, associated with Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the wider Southern tradition of honoring military figures with given names.
By the mid-twentieth century, Lee had become a popular feminine middle and suffix name, lending a soft, pastoral note to compound constructions like Janalee, Annalee, and Kimberlee. Janalee is characteristic of the American Mid-century vogue for mellifluous blended names that feel both familiar in their components and fresh as a complete construction. The three-syllable flow — JAN-a-lee — gives it a natural spoken rhythm, easy on the ear and memorable. It belongs to a generation of names that prized this kind of musical craftsmanship, treating a child's name as a small lyric object to be composed rather than simply selected.