Variant of Savannah, from Spanish 'sabana' meaning 'treeless plain,' also a place name.
Savanah is an alternate spelling of Savannah, a name drawn from the geographical landscape of the American South and, deeper still, from a word that traveled across an ocean and several centuries to arrive there. The English savannah derives from the Spanish sabana, which was itself borrowed from the Taíno word zabana, meaning an open treeless plain. The Taíno people of the Caribbean used it to describe the flat grasslands of their islands, and Spanish explorers carried the word into their expanding vocabulary of the New World.
The city of Savannah, Georgia — founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe and laid out in one of urban planning's most admired grid systems of squares — lent the word its specifically American romantic weight. Savannah became associated with antebellum grandeur, Spanish moss draping live oaks, the smell of salt air and magnolia, a certain gothic literary atmosphere captured most vividly in John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The name absorbed all of this — landscape, history, sensory richness — and became a given name with unusual geographic poetry.
As a given name, Savannah began its rise in the United States during the 1980s and surged through the 1990s, consistently appearing among the top names for girls. The spelling Savanah, with a single final h, gives the name a slightly streamlined appearance while preserving its sound entirely. It suggests a parent who appreciated the name's evocative beauty but made it quietly their own — a small and personal distinction within a shared tradition.