Kharissa is a name of Middle Eastern origin, typically spelled with the letter "kh" at the beginning to represent the guttural sound made in Arabic, Persian, and some other languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), this sound is transcribed as /x/, which is similar to the "ch" sound in Scottish "loch". The rest of the name is spelled phonetically with a "k" and "a" followed by the short "i" sound, pronounced like "ee" in "treat", an "s", and then ending with another short "a".