Belle
- Pronunciation
- [Bell]
- Gender
- Female
- Meaning
- Fair: Lovely One.
- Origin
- French
About the Name Belle
Belle derives from the French belle, meaning beautiful or lovely one — one of the most direct and transparent given-name meanings in the French tradition, requiring no etymological detective work. The French belle comes from the Latin bella (beautiful, fair), itself related to bonus (good), giving the name a root that has branched into Italian, Spanish, and Romanian cognates. As a given name, Belle was used both as a standalone form and as the familiar short version of longer names like Isabella and Arabella, adding layers of elegance to what is already an immediately legible name.
Belle Perez (born 1976) is a Belgian-Spanish singer and songwriter — born Annabelle Perez Robles — whose two-decade career has made her one of the prominent Belgian-Spanish-language Latin-pop figures of the late 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, demonstrating the name's contemporary viability in European pop culture.
In US Social Security records, Belle appears in the female top-1000 from 1880 — the first year of tracked data — reaching its best rank of #90 that year before moving in and out of the rankings over a remarkable span of more than a century. Its most recent top-1000 appearances show a name in active revival: #873 in 2019, #1000 in 2020, and #970 in 2022, the last tracked year, accumulating 3,049 top-1000 births across its entire recorded run. Recorded variants include Bela, Belinda, Bell, Bella, and Bellina — a family of forms that span from the single-syllable Bell to the elaborated Bellina and the now enormously popular Bella, which has largely overshadowed its shorter sibling in recent naming charts.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Belle
US Popularity History (1880–2022)
Annual US births named Belle by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2017 with 339 girls named Belle (girl rank #806 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2022, ranked #970 for girls (274 US births). That's 164 places below its 2017 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Belle Most Popular?
Average girl-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's girls-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Belle the strongest states are Utah, Oregon, Wisconsin.
Strongest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utah | #508 | 55 |
| 2 | Oregon | #573 | 18 |
| 3 | Wisconsin | #660 | 22 |
| 4 | Minnesota | #668 | 54 |
| 5 | Massachusetts | #692 | 36 |
| 6 | Louisiana | #717 | 26 |
| 7 | Arizona | #725 | 55 |
| 8 | Colorado | #762 | 46 |
| 9 | Maryland | #768 | 19 |
| 10 | Pennsylvania | #770 | 87 |
Weakest girls-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | #1,045 | 107 |
| 2 | North Carolina | #852 | 30 |
| 3 | Virginia | #849 | 41 |
| 4 | Michigan | #838 | 63 |
| 5 | Florida | #833 | 153 |
| 6 | Tennessee | #825 | 24 |
| 7 | Indiana | #813 | 37 |
| 8 | Ohio | #812 | 61 |
| 9 | Washington | #795 | 64 |
| 10 | Illinois | #787 | 39 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Belle in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
Famous People Named Belle
1 notable figure from history and culture who share the name Belle.
- Belle Perez — World Music Singer (1976)
Looking for names like Belle?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Belle to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Belle against today's most popular girls-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).
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