Meaning and history
Latinate form of Clarice. This is the name of the title character in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa, where Clarissa Harlowe is a virtuous woman tragically exploited by her family and her lover. Another literary character with this name is Clarissa Dalloway from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
20062006: 675 births, rank #469
2007: 644 births, rank #502
2008: 546 births, rank #563
2009: 499 births, rank #604
2010: 530 births, rank #550
20112011: 479 births, rank #598
2012: 453 births, rank #632
2013: 396 births, rank #705
2014: 364 births, rank #768
2015: 408 births, rank #697
20162016: 455 births, rank #645
2017: 431 births, rank #680
2018: 372 births, rank #745
2019: 378 births, rank #746
2020: 287 births, rank #911
20212021: 278 births, rank #948
2022: 246 births, rank #1,039
2023: 209 births, rank #1,158
2024: 207 births, rank #1,160
20252025: 212 births, rank #1,113
Clarissa moved from #911 to #949 for girls between 2020 and 2021. Its highest annual birth count came in 1995, with 1,201 births.