Bette is a short form of Elizabeth. Bette Davis (1908-1989) was the American actress widely considered one of the greatest film actresses in Hollywood history — two-time Best Actress Oscar winner (Dangerous 1935, Jezebel 1938), with a record-setting 10 Best Actress nominations. First woman to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award (1977). Her eyes — 'Bette Davis Eyes' — became a 1981 Kim Carnes hit song that won the Grammy for Record of the Year.
Subject of Ed Sikov's Dark Victory (2007).
Bette 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 Bette reduce to 7, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.