From the French region Lorraine, meaning 'from the province of Lothar.'
Loraine is a variant of Lorraine, a name that began not as a personal name at all but as a geography — the region in northeastern France whose German name, Lothringen, commemorates Lothair I, the ninth-century Frankish king who inherited that territory under the Treaty of Verdun in 843. The region's turbulent history — contested between France and the German states across centuries, ceded to Prussia after the Franco-Prussian War, reclaimed by France after World War One — gave Lorraine a peculiar intensity of identity. To be from Lorraine was to be from a place that had fought, repeatedly and at enormous cost, to remain itself.
The name's most luminous historical association is with Joan of Arc — Jeanne d'Arc — who was born in Domrémy, a village in the Lorraine region, around 1412. Though Joan herself is not called Lorraine, the connection between this young woman who claimed divine visions and rallied France, and the embattled province of her birth, deepened the name's emotional resonance considerably. In the twentieth century Lorraine became fashionable in the English-speaking world, particularly in the 1930s through 1950s, carried partly by its French elegance and partly by the cross-cultural currents of the war era, when French names enjoyed a vogue of romantic solidarity in Britain and America.
The spelling Loraine — dropping the second r — gives the name a slightly more streamlined appearance while retaining all its French phonetic warmth. Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright who wrote A Raisin in the Sun and became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, brought the name into the American cultural canon with a force that still resonates. In its Loraine form, the name feels simultaneously intimate and worldly — a provincial French origin carrying the weight of history across an ocean.