A variant of Kimberly, from an English place name meaning "Cyneburg's meadow" or royal meadow.
Kimberlee is a feminized, elaborated variant of Kimberley, a name with one of the more precisely dated origin points in the English-speaking world. The city of Kimberley in the Northern Cape of South Africa was named in 1873 after John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, then serving as British Colonial Secretary. The city existed because of diamonds — extraordinary, world-reordering quantities of diamonds discovered in 1871 — and its name therefore carries within it the entire explosive history of the diamond rush, the De Beers empire, and the Boer Wars.
The name crossed gender lines and oceans during the mid-twentieth century, when Kimberly became one of the most popular girls' names in the United States through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s — propelled partly by a character in the 1955 film Kimberly Jim and by the general mid-century appetite for place-names repurposed as given names. The spelling variants Kimberlee and Kimberly proliferated during this peak, each family adding a vowel or changing a letter to distinguish their daughter within a crowded field. The nickname Kim carried its own parallel cultural life through Kipling's 1901 novel Kim and the long career of Kim Novak, giving the short form a cinematic, slightly mysterious shimmer.
Kimberlee, with its double-e ending, has a distinctly American warmth — informal, sunny, and generous — that distinguishes it from both the more formal Kimberly and the place name that started it all. In an era when that generation's children are now adults, the name carries a soft nostalgia.