Variant of Mabel, from Latin 'amabilis' meaning lovable or dear.
Mable is a variant spelling of Mabel, a name that carries the warmth of the Victorian parlor alongside a Latin root of remarkable sweetness: amabilis, meaning "lovable" or "worthy of love." The name entered English through the Norman French Amabel, which was itself borrowed from the Latin in the high medieval period when Latin church culture was saturating the names of Western Europe. Over time Amabel contracted into Mabel, and by the nineteenth century it was a household staple across England and America — the kind of name that appeared on samplers and in family Bibles without anyone thinking it remarkable.
Mabel enjoyed her greatest popularity in the 1880s and 1890s, when she ranked among the top names in both Britain and the United States. She appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan — the operetta Ruddigore features a Mabel — and in countless Victorian novels as a figure of domestic sweetness and moral rectitude. The slightly more phonetic spelling Mable appeared as a variant during this same era, used interchangeably in birth records and newspapers, carrying no different meaning but offering parents a small orthographic distinction.
The comic actress Mabel Normand, a major star of early Hollywood silent films, gave both spellings a more spirited association in the early twentieth century. Mable, like Mabel, declined sharply after the 1920s, associated with a generation of grandmothers rather than children, until the great vintage name revival of the 2010s brought it roaring back. Today Mable feels both nostalgic and fresh — part of the same cohort as Pearl, Hazel, and Edith — a name that wears its old age as character rather than dustiness. Its meaning, after all, has never stopped being exactly right.