Mariel is a modern English elaboration of Mary — from the Hebrew Miryam ("beloved, bitter, star of the sea") — possibly influenced by the Spanish Mariel (a coastal town in Cuba). Mariel Hemingway (born 1961) — *American actress; granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway; received the Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) at age 18 — at the time among the youngest Best Supporting Actress nominees. Played her own sister Margaux in Lipstick (1976, the year of her film debut); Star 80 (1983) about Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten — Cannes Film Festival Award; Personal Best (1982). Author of the wellness memoirs Out Came the Sun (2015, about depression and her family's history of mental illness — six members of the Hemingway family died by suicide across three generations) and Running with Nature (2013). Mariel of Brittany — Arthurian legendary princess. The Mariel boatlift (April-October 1980) brought 125,000 Cuban refugees to Florida — including Reinaldo Arenas. Mariel Margaret Hamm is Mia Hamm* (born Mariel Margaret Hamm) — covered separately as Mia.
Featured throughout 1970s-2010s American cinema.
Mariel 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 Mariel reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.