Arlo
/ˈɑɹ.loʊ/
The name Arlo has a curious and partly invented history. It first appears in print in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), where Arlo Hill features as the setting for the goddess Mutability’s trial in Book VII.
Spenser took the name from the Irish place name Aherlow, in the Glen of Aherlow, County Tipperary, derived from the Irish eatharlach, meaning “between 2 highlands” or “valley between hills.” The literary form Arlo is therefore a poetic Anglicization
of an Irish topographic word.
What the name Arlo means
A separate possible origin connects the name to the Old German Arnulf through the diminutive Arnold, meaning “eagle ruler.” Some 19th-century American bearers, particularly in immigrant German communities of Pennsylvania and Ohio, used Arlo as a short
form of Arnold.
A third candidate is the Spanish word arlo, an old name for the barberry shrub. None of these competing etymologies has fully displaced the Spenserian Irish reading, which remains the most widely cited.
The name owes its modern recognition almost entirely to one figure: the American folk singer Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947, son of Woody Guthrie and composer of the 1967 talking-blues epic Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, an 18-minute Thanksgiving anthem
that has aired on US radio every Thanksgiving Day for more than half a century.
His performance at the original Woodstock festival in 1969 further fixed the name in the countercultural imagination.
Arlo had drifted in and out of the US Social Security records in tiny numbers throughout the 20th century but only re-entered the top 1000 in 2011. Its rise since has been one of the steepest of any short vintage boys’ name, climbing past No.
200 by 2020 and into the top 130 by 2024. The pattern is repeated in England and Wales, where Arlo has been a top-30 name for several years, and in Australia and New Zealand, where it ranks even higher.
Contemporary bearers include the son of British actor Toby Maguire, the son of model Daisy Lowe, and a wave of celebrity sons born to British and Australian parents in the 2010s.
Arlo belongs squarely to the soft, 2-syllable, vowel-rich revival that has given the world Otis, Hugo, Milo, and Theo, and stands out for the literary quirk of having been first printed by the author of The Shepheardes Calender.
US popularity over time
Numerology and symbolism
Based on Pythagorean numerology — a traditional system linking name letters to numbers. Presented for cultural interest.
Famous people named Arlo
Arlo - similar names
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