Clarissa is a female given name borrowed from Latin, Italian, and Portuguese. It is a combination of St. Clare of Assisi's Latin name Clara (originally meaning "clear" and "bright") and the suffix -issa, equivalent to -ess. Clarice is an anglicization of Clarisse, the French form of the same name. Clarisa is the Spanish form of the name, and Klárisza the Hungarian. The given names Clara, Clare, and Claire are all cognates.
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Notable people
Clara Barton (Clarissa Harlowe Barton, 1821–1912), American humanitarian who founded the American Red Cross
Clarissa Britain (1816–1895), American inventor
Clarissa Danforth (1792–1855), first woman ordained as a Free Will Baptist minister
Clarissa Davis (born 1967), American coach and women's basketball hall-of-famer
Clarissa Dickson Wright (1947–2014), English celebrity chef
Clarissa F. Dye (1832–1921), Civil War nurse from Philadelphia
Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (1920–2021)
Clarissa Pinkola Estés (born 1945), American writer and Jungian psychoanalyst
Clarissa Caldwell Lathrop (1847–1892), American social reformer, autobiographer
Clarissa Kaye (1931–1994), Australian stage, film and television actress
Clarissa Ward (born 1980), British-American television journalist
Clarissa Wei, American journalist and writer
Clarissa Stadler (born 1966), Austrian journalist, moderator and writer
Fictional characters
Clarissa Darling from Clarissa Explains It All, a children's TV show in the 1990s
Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway, a 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf
Clarissa "Clary" Fray in The Mortal Instruments novel series
Clarissa Harlowe, the heroine of Samuel Richardson's 1748 tragic epistolary novel Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady
Clarissa Hailsham-Brown in Spider's Web, a 1954 play by Agatha Christie
Clarissa Mao in The Expanse (novel series), and its TV adaptation The Expanse (TV series)
Clarissa Mellon in Enduring Love, a 1997 novel by Ian McEwan
Clarissa Saunders in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a 1939 film
Clarissa Stamp in Murder on the Leviathan, a 1998 novel by Boris Akunin
Clarissa Vaughan in The Hours, a 2002 film directed by Stephen Daldry, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham