Variant of Charlene, feminine form of Charles, meaning 'free woman.'
Sharlene is a variant of Charlene, itself a feminine diminutive of Charles, which traces back through the Latinized Carolus to the Old High German *Karl* — meaning a free man or a man of the common people, though the name became synonymous with royalty through Charlemagne. The feminization of Charles into Charlene was primarily a twentieth-century Anglophone development, and Sharlene represents a further personalization: the *Sh-* prefix giving the name a softer, more phonetically intimate opening syllable that was particularly fashionable in mid-century American and Australian naming.
The name enjoyed its peak popularity in the 1950s through 1970s across the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where it became part of a cohort of feminine names — Sherry, Sheryl, Sharon, Sharlene — sharing that warm sibilant opening. In Australia the name gained particular cultural resonance through the soap opera *Neighbours*, which featured a character named Charlene played by Kylie Minogue in the late 1980s, reviving interest in the name cluster just as it was beginning to fade. Today Sharlene has the quality many mid-century names are beginning to recover: a retro warmth that reads as genuinely vintage rather than merely dated.
It carries the informal friendliness of the era that coined it — unpretentious, musical, distinctly personal in a way that its more formal ancestor Charles could never quite achieve. For families with connections to that mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world, Sharlene offers a meaningful link to a specific cultural moment.