From Persian 'Roshanak' meaning dawn or bright; the wife of Alexander the Great.
Roxanna is the fuller, more formally dressed version of a name with spectacular ancient credentials. The original Persian Roshanak — "bright," "radiant," "dawn" — was Hellenized into Roxane when Alexander the Great married the Bactrian noblewoman of that name in 327 BCE. Their union was politically strategic but apparently emotionally genuine; she was reportedly the only one of his wives to accompany him on campaign.
After Alexander's death in 323 BCE, Roxane fought fiercely to secure the succession for their posthumous son Alexander IV, before both were eventually murdered in the wars of the Diadochi. She is one of antiquity's most dramatic figures: a woman of foreign birth who reached the height of Macedonian power and died for it. The name traveled through Latin as Roxana and developed the extended form Roxanna — a Latinate elaboration giving it a more ceremonial weight — which became common in Western Europe during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods when classical antiquity was fashionable.
Daniel Defoe used Roxana as the title and name of his 1724 novel about a fallen woman of beauty and ambition, linking the name to a certain dangerous glamour. That literary shadow persisted, giving Roxanna a reputation as a name for women who were difficult to look away from. The name exists today in a range of spellings — Roxana, Roxanne, Roxanna — each carrying slightly different tonal weight.
Roxanna, with its doubled final syllable, feels the most deliberately formal, the most consciously classical. It suits parents who want the full story: the Persian princess, the ancient meaning, the centuries of literary resonance. It is a name that has already survived two and a half millennia and shows no signs of exhausting its appeal.