Meaning & Origin
A female given name originating as a coinage.
Pamela is a girl's and boy's baby name of Greek origin, coined by 16th-century poet Sir Philip Sidney for his pastoral romance Arcadia. Sidney invented the name from the Greek elements pan (all) and meli (honey), creating a name meaning "all sweetness."
Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela (1740) — one of the first English novels — popularized the name enormously. It reached its American peak in the 1950s and 1960s. A name literally invented by a poet and beloved by novelists, Pamela has literary DNA running through it from the very start.