Frankly, My Dear, What a Name
Scarlett comes from the Old French escarlate, meaning "fine and costly cloth," carried into Middle English as a trade surname before a Southern belle and a Hollywood actress transformed it into one of the boldest names of the modern era.
It is bold without being brash. Romantic without being frilly. So thoroughly associated with the color red that it is difficult to imagine the word ever meant anything else.
But it did. And the original meaning is considerably more interesting than the color.
📌 Scarlett at a Glance
Pronunciation: SKAR-let
Origin: English, from a medieval occupational surname with Old French roots
Meaning: Fine, costly cloth; later associated with brilliant red
Root: Old French escarlate ("fine, costly cloth")
Style: Bold, romantic, glamorous, spirited
Variants: Scarlet
Nicknames: Scar, Lettie
Popularity: #32 in the United States — one of the most successful surname-to-given-name transformations of the modern era
Destiny Number: 8 — the builder
🧵 Before Scarlett Was Red
Here is the unexpected thing about Scarlett: the color came second.
The English word scarlet appeared in the Middle Ages, borrowed from the Old French escarlate — a word for a particularly fine and costly kind of cloth. And despite what we now picture, medieval scarlet was not necessarily red. What distinguished it was quality, not hue. This was luxury fabric — the kind that moved through medieval markets at serious prices and was worn by people who wanted everyone in the room to know they could afford it.
Fine textiles were the status symbols of medieval Europe in a way that is difficult to fully appreciate today. The people who made, dyed, and sold them occupied important positions in the commercial life of growing towns — and like Baker, Smith, Cooper, and Taylor, a person associated with scarlet cloth could acquire a surname identifying his trade.
Enter Scarlet — and eventually, with the double t that would become standard, Scarlett.
The surname appears in English records from the late 12th century. For several hundred years it remained exactly what it was: a respectable English family name with expensive taste and absolutely no ambition to become a girls' name.
That was about to change. But first the cloth had to become a color.
❤️ When the Cloth Became a Color
By the late 14th century, scarlet was increasingly being used for the brilliant, highly saturated red we recognize today. The fabric receded from everyday memory. The color took over completely. And what a color to inherit.
Scarlet became the red of drama and ceremony, passion and danger, royalty and rebellion. Biblical imagery added another layer — Isaiah's "though your sins be as scarlet," Revelation's scarlet woman — giving the color associations with sin and extravagance alongside its undeniable richness.
Then, in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne stitched the letter A onto Hester Prynne's chest in The Scarlet Letter and gave scarlet its specifically American literary resonance: shame, defiance, and the slow, painful reclamation of identity. Scarlet was no longer just a color. It was an argument about what a woman could survive.
By the time Scarlett finally emerged as a given name, it carried more emotional weight than its medieval cloth-selling ancestors could possibly have imagined. Which turned out to be exactly right for the woman who would make it famous.
🎬 The Name That Almost Didn't Happen
In 1936, an American novelist named Margaret Mitchell published a book that would permanently change what Scarlett meant. But here is the thing — and it is the most important thing in the entire history of this name — she almost called her heroine something else entirely. During the writing of Gone with the Wind, Mitchell's Southern belle was named Pansy O'Hara.
Pansy. Take a moment with that.
Pansy standing on the staircase at Tara. Pansy making a dress out of green velvet curtains. Rhett Butler finally walking out on her and saying: “Frankly, Pansy, I don't give a damn.”
No. Absolutely not.
Fortunately, before the novel was published, Mitchell changed her heroine's name to Katie Scarlett O'Hara — Scarlett being explained as a family surname, her paternal grandmother's maiden name. Katie was technically her first name. Nobody remembers Katie. She was simply Scarlett. And suddenly the old cloth merchant's surname had a personality.
Scarlett O'Hara is spoiled, vain, clever, selfish, seductive, infuriating, and almost impossible to defeat. When the Civil War destroys the comfortable world she knows, she doesn't grieve elegantly into a handkerchief. She schemes. She works. She survives. And when she runs out of food, she pulls a radish from the ground, holds it to the sky, and declares that she will never go hungry again.
Mitchell's novel won the Pulitzer Prize. The 1939 film with Vivien Leigh gave Scarlett a face, a voice, a sixteen-inch waist, and one of the most memorable personalities in cinema history. After that, Scarlett was no longer merely a surname. It was a woman's name. And the associations Mitchell created for it — fiery, vibrant, dynamic, determined, glamorous, headstrong, and impossible to ignore — fit the brilliant red color so perfectly that the name and the woman seem almost destined for each other.
📈 The Long Climb to the Top
The American naming charts tell the story with satisfying precision. Scarlett entered the U.S. Top 1000 in 1940, immediately following the blockbuster film. And then — somewhat surprisingly — America did not immediately fill its nurseries with little Scarletts. Perhaps Scarlett O'Hara was simply too much Scarlett. The name remained relatively uncommon for decades, a familiar cultural reference rather than a mainstream naming choice.
Then the twenty-first century arrived and everything changed. Scarlett ranked #758 as recently as 2003. From there it began one of the more impressive climbs in modern American naming history — #423 in 2005, #211 in 2008, #115 in 2010, #61 in 2012, #18 by 2016. Today it sits at #32 — one of the most successful surname-to-given-name transformations of the modern era.
Right in the middle of that rise was another famous Scarlett.
🎭 The Other Scarlett
Scarlett Johansson became one of Hollywood's most recognizable actresses in the early 2000s — breakout performances in Lost in Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring in 2003, followed by a career that made her one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood for over a decade. Her long-running role as Natasha Romanoff — Black Widow — in the Marvel Cinematic Universe put her face in front of one of the largest global film audiences in history.
The timing of her rise and the name's climb is impossible to ignore. Johansson didn't invent Scarlett's appeal — Miss O'Hara had taken care of that nearly seventy years earlier — but she introduced it to an entirely new generation who knew Scarlett not as a Civil War heroine, but as one of Hollywood's most glamorous stars.
They were right.
By then Scarlett fit perfectly into a broader naming trend — parents rediscovering names that felt vintage, feminine, and substantial without being delicate. Charlotte. Violet. Ruby. Stella. Scarlett belonged beautifully in their company, but with considerably more fire than any of them.
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🔢 Scarlett in Numerology
In Name Stories numerology, Scarlett carries the energy of the Destiny Number 8 — and for a name whose greatest fictional bearer responded to losing everything by rebuilding from the ground up, it couldn't feel more right.
Eights are the builders. Ambitious, determined, and possessed of both the vision to see what could exist and the practicality to make it happen, they measure success not by what they were given but by what they constructed. They see the big picture and the smallest details simultaneously. They are not easily discouraged. They are, in fact, almost impossible to permanently discourage — which brings us back, inevitably, to Scarlett O'Hara pulling radishes from the ground at Tara and declaring war on hunger itself.
Eight energy is the energy of someone who assesses the damage, makes a plan, and gets to work. That is, in every meaningful sense, the most Scarlett thing imaginable.
⭐ Final Thoughts on Scarlett
Scarlett has traveled an extraordinary distance for a name that started life in the medieval fabric trade. Bolts of expensive cloth gave it to the merchants who sold them. The merchants gave it to their descendants as a surname. The surname acquired the associations of the most dramatic color in the English language. And then Margaret Mitchell handed it to a woman named Katie and the rest, as they say, is American literary history.
Today Scarlett manages a rare balancing act — medieval yet modern, feminine yet fierce, romantic yet completely unbothered by anyone's expectations. Its association with brilliant red gives it warmth and drama. Its fictional legacy gives it a personality so vivid that it has never needed explaining.
And frankly, my dear, we wouldn't expect it to.
What do you think? Tell us in the comments! 👇
— Julie Hackett
Founder, Name Stories® | Santa Barbara, California
Last Updated: September 2026
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