Zoee is a spelling variant of Zoe, from Greek meaning life.
Zoee is a stylized variant of Zoe, one of the most luminous names in the Western tradition. The root, the ancient Greek ζωή (zōē), means simply "life" — not existence in the dull biological sense, but life as vitality, as the animating force that distinguishes the living from the unliving. It was a name of immense theological weight in early Christianity: when early Greek-speaking Christians translated the Hebrew scriptures and encountered the word for life in Genesis and the Psalms, ζωή was their word of choice.
It appears throughout the Gospel of John with the phrase "eternal life" — ζωὴ αἰώνιος — as the very gift Christ promises. Zoe was adopted by the Byzantine imperial court, where it was borne by the remarkable Empress Zoe of Constantinople, who ruled — co-ruled, schemed, married, and outlasted — much of the early eleventh century, one of the most forceful women in Byzantine history. In Western Europe the name traveled slowly, considered almost exclusively Greek or Eastern until a revival in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought it into the English-speaking mainstream.
By the 1990s Zoe had become genuinely fashionable in Britain and America, and it has remained beloved for its brevity and its radiant meaning. The spelling Zoee is a thoroughly contemporary flourish — the doubled final "e" is a soft visual emphasis, slowing the reader's eye at the end of the name and giving it an added visual elegance on a page or a name tag. Parents who choose it are often drawn by a desire to distinguish their child's name from the hundreds of other Zoes in a classroom, while preserving every note of the original's extraordinary history. In Zoee, ancient light shines through a modern window.