A male name. the name of a dukedom created in 1362 for Lionel, 3rd s. of Edward III, who had m. the heiress of Clare in Suffolk. In Latin his title became dux Clarensis, dux Clarenciae. The title was later held by George, the unfortunate brother of Edward IV and Richard III, Shakespeare’s ‘false fleeting perjured Clarence’, and was revived some 300 years later for the 3rd s. of George III, later William IV, and again for the elder s. of Edward VII. It was after this last Duke of Clarence that Clarence came into use as a christian name at the end of the 19th C.

From clarens, the present participle of clarere, ‘to be renowned,’ in pre-classical Latin; operative too, it would seem, were classical Latin clarus, ‘famous,’—County Clare (admittedly after ‘Red De Clare’, stout Glos’ter’s earl, the foe of Henry III) amplified as a dukedom into Clarence—and the Suffolk village of Clare. As a m. ‘Christian’, Clarence arose in late C16; it was popularised, William IV was Duke of Clarence (Yonge). Like Algernon, Cecil, Cuthbert, Harold, Horace, and Percy, the name has, among the more godless proletarians, become derisive: witness, e. g., Weekley, W. & N., pp. 91-92.

A Latin name, meaning: Famous.