Ariel etymologically derives from (אֲרִיאֵל, Standard Hebrew Ariʾel, Tiberian Hebrew ʾĂrîʾēl) a unisex name meaning "lion of God." Other feminine variants include: Arielle, Ariele, Ariella. See also Ariel (spirit) and Names of Jerusalem.

Famous people named Ariel include:

• the female vocalist from the psychedelic trance project X-Dream.
• Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.

Ariel can also refer to characters in works of fiction:

• Ariel is a spirit who was a servant of Prospero in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.
• Ariel is the chief of the sylphs serving Belinda in Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock.
• Ariel is a player in the Walpurgis Night Dream Scene of Goethe's Faust Part 1, and gives Faust water from the river Lethe in the first scene of Part 2.
• Ariel is the red-haired mermaid who is fascinated by life on dry land and falls in love with Prince Eric in the 1989 Disney movie The Little Mermaid.
• Ariel is a spirit who is bound to the Pillars of Nosgoth in the Legacy of Kain video game series.

Ariel can also refer to the following literary works:

• Ariel is the in-house magazine of the BBC, named after the statue of Shakespeare's Prospero and Ariel by Eric Gill on the front of the BBC's Broadcasting House, London.
• Ariel: a Shelley Romance is a novelized biography by André Maurois of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was drowned in a sailboat, Ariel, in the Bay of Lerici, 1822.
• Ariel is a science fiction novel by Russian author Alexander Beliaev.
• Ariel was the last book of poetry by Sylvia Plath.

The following locations are named Ariel:

• Ariel is a moon of Uranus discovered in 1851 by William Lassell.
• Ariel, West Bank is an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, between Nablus and Ramallah.

Several commercial products are named Ariel:

• Ariel is a washing powder brand of Procter & Gamble.
• Ariel is a UK car company [1]. The name is inherited from a lineage of cars, motorcycles and bicycles going back to 1871.