Alanis is the feminine of Alan — possibly from the Celtic ailín ("rock, little rock") or Greek alanos ("harmonious") — used as a 1970s North American given name. Alanis Morissette (born 1974) — *Canadian-American singer-songwriter; her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill sold over 33 million copies worldwide — the best-selling debut album ever by a female artist at the time of its release. Five Grammy Awards (1996) including Album of the Year — at age 21, the youngest woman to win Album of the Year for over two decades (a record broken by Billie Eilish in 2020). "You Oughta Know" (1995), "Ironic" (1995), "You Learn," "Hand in My Pocket" — Jagged Little Pill is on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The Broadway musical adaptation Jagged Little Pill (2019) won the Tony Award for Best Score and was nominated for Best Musical. Inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame (2015). Alanis Mitchell — Mythological reference. Other Alanis* namesakes include Alanis Obomsawin — Abenaki Canadian documentary filmmaker; Order of Canada — the most-acclaimed Indigenous Canadian documentary director of the 20th century.
Featured throughout 1990s pop music history.
Alanis does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Alanis reduce to 2, The Peacemaker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.