There was consideration of many possible names before Mrs Pam Cory suggested that Arana, as an Aboriginal word for welcome, would be appropriate. Some years later, a newcomer claimed the word Orana was Welcome and that Arana was the word for Moon. Without anything more than an unsuccessful cursory check of available dictionaries of Aboriginal words, the substituted meaning was featured in the 1978 Arana Hills logo design. Aboriginal people never developed writing, so the naming words were written by Europeans in Roman script as they interpreted hearing the sounds. It has been suggested that vowels are not as important as consonants in the native languages, so Arana could just as well be transcribed as Orana or Urana.