Clarice
Meaning
clear, famous (feminine form of Clarence); immortalized by Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The story
Clarice belongs to the luminous Latin family built on clarus, clear and famous, and it carried a lace-collar, old-fashioned elegance that reads very differently after 1991. That was the year Jodie Foster played FBI trainee Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, winning the Oscar in a film that swept all five major Academy Awards and giving the movies one of their most quietly formidable heroines. The name itself had been fading by then: a familiar presence in American records through the first half of the twentieth century, it thinned noticeably from the 1960s onward. Since the 2000s it has recovered its old modest level and held it, a small second act for a name whose most famous bearer specialized in exactly that kind of composure under pressure. Clear, famous, and unbothered: the meaning turned out to be a job description.
Clarice's name family
One shared root links 6 names across 2 languages.
Shared root: from Latin clarus "clear, bright, famous", sainted by Clare of Assisi
The constellation
More branches
Popularity, 1890–2024
Shape drawn from US Social Security baby-name records. Clarice peaked in the 1890s and the 2020s in nearly equal measure.
Popularity in Brazil
83,134 people · the #369 first name in Brazil · about 1 in 2,445 · median age 44
Among people named Clarice living in Brazil at the 2022 census, more were born in the 1960s than in any other decade.
The census also counted 6,638 born between 2020 and August 2022, too recent a span to chart.
Source: IBGE, Censo Demográfico 2022
When you meet Clarice
People given the name Clarice in the United States span the generations: the middle half were born anywhere from 1940 to 1999. Age is the one thing the name won't tell you.
Estimated from US Social Security birth registrations and typical lifespans; a rough guide, not a rule.
The Clarice deep dive
Whether you’re naming a baby or exploring your own name’s history, this is a personal letter, not a list: where Clarice truly comes from, how it traveled, and what a century of records reveals. If you have grown a tree on nametree, it also considers how Clarice fits with your family’s names and surname.
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