Variant of Nell, a pet form of Eleanor or Helen meaning bright light.
Nelle is a name that most Americans encounter without knowing it: Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was born Nelle Harper Lee, named after her maternal grandmother, Ellen Corrie Anderson — Nelle being Ellen spelled in reverse. Lee spent her life writing under her middle name partly to avoid assumptions of gender, but Nelle remained the name her family called her, intimate and particular.
That quiet literary association gives the name a kind of unannounced gravitas: it is the private name of one of the twentieth century's most consequential American novelists, a name that lived out of the spotlight while the books it belonged to changed a nation. Beyond that specific connection, Nelle belongs to the broad family of Nell- names that have circulated in English-speaking countries for centuries, most of them diminutives of longer forms: Eleanor (from the Provençal Alienor, itself of debated origin), Helen (from the Greek, meaning "torch" or possibly "the bright one"), and Cornelia (the Latin feminine of Cornelius). The historical Nells include Nell Gwyn, the Cockney orange-seller who became Charles II's most celebrated mistress and remained genuinely beloved by the English public for her warmth and wit.
Charles Dickens gave the name its most sentimental monument in Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop, whose death moved Victorian readers to public mourning. Nelle, with its final e, softens Nell into something slightly more continental and quietly elegant — a name that feels both antique and freshly discovered.