Diminutive of Roberta or Barbara, meaning bright fame or foreign woman.
Bobbi (also spelled Bobby or Bobbie) arrived as a nickname before becoming a standalone name, and its path begins with Barbara — from the Greek barbaros, meaning "foreign" or "strange," a term the Greeks applied to anyone who did not speak Greek. Barbara became a beloved Christian name through the legend of St. Barbara, a third-century martyr of uncertain historicity whose story nonetheless captivated the medieval imagination.
The nickname journey from Barbara to Bobbi ran through Bab, then Bob (by the same mysterious linguistic flip that turned William into Bill and Robert into Bob), and finally settled into Bobbi with a feminine -i ending that became fashionable in the mid-twentieth century. Bobbi also functions as a short form of Roberta, itself the feminine of Robert, from the Old High German Hrodebert — "bright fame." In the golden age of nickname-names during the 1940s and 1950s, Bobbi had a tomboy-chic appeal, sitting alongside Frankie, Billie, and Ronnie as names that bent gender conventions with a kind of cheerful confidence.
The spelling with a final -i, rather than -y or -ie, emerged especially in the mid-twentieth century as a way of feminizing these borrowed masculine nicknames while keeping their breezy informality. Among the most prominent modern bearers is Bobbi Kristina Brown, the daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, which kept the name in public consciousness into the 2010s. In the beauty world, the makeup artist and entrepreneur Bobbi Brown built an eponymous cosmetics empire that became synonymous with natural, professional elegance. Today Bobbi sits in a pleasantly retro space — it evokes drive-in diners and saddle shoes but also carries a quietly cool self-assurance, the kind of name that suggests a person comfortable in their own skin.