Paulette is the French diminutive of Paule — from the Latin paulus ("small, humble"). A top-300 US baby name from 1928 to 1969. Paulette Goddard (1910-1990) — American actress; the female lead in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) — two of the most-acclaimed comedies of the 1930s-40s; reportedly Chaplin's wife from 1936 to 1942 (though the marriage was never legally proven, which famously cost her the Scarlett O'Hara role in Gone with the Wind)*; The Women (1939), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for So Proudly We Hail! (1943). Paulette Lebrun (1882-1979) — wife of French President Albert Lebrun (1932-1940). Paulette Nardal (1896-1985) — Martinique-born French writer; pioneer of the Négritude literary and political movement of the 1930s alongside Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor; her Paris salon was the intellectual cradle of the movement. Paulette Carlson — American country singer; lead vocalist of Highway 101. Paulette in The Naked City (1948) — one of the earliest naturalistic American crime films, winner of two Academy Awards. Paulette Cooper — American author; The Scandal of Scientology* (1971) prompted the Church of Scientology's "Operation Freakout" against her — one of the most-investigated harassment campaigns in modern American media history.
Featured throughout 20th-century American film and French intellectual life.
Paulette 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 Paulette reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.