Abraham in Arabic: إبراهيم, أبراهام, and Which One to Use

Abraham in Arabic is إبراهيم (Ibrāhīm), the patriarch of the Quran and the Arabic Bible alike. Muslims and Arab Christians share it. For an English speaker named Abraham, Arabic Wikipedia spells the sound instead, أبراهام (Abrāhām), as for the psychologist Abraham Maslow.

Copy the form you need. The Listen button reads each spelling in your device's Arabic voice, if it has one, so you can hear how إبراهيم and أبراهام differ.

Abraham in Arabic calligraphy: إبراهيم in three styles

Three renders of إبراهيم, in Amiri, Reem Kufi and Aref Ruqaa, drawn straight from the font files.

إبراهيم or أبراهام: which spelling should you use?

Use إبراهيم for the name itself: Surah 14 of the Quran is named after him, and Wikipedia notes that in Islam he carries the title Khalīl Allāh, friend of God, the source of the name Khalil, خليل. Use أبراهام for an English speaker: three of the four modern Abrahams in the table further down have it, and the fourth, the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, has إبراهام, with the hamza below.

How Arabic Wikipedia writes people called Abraham

For the patriarch Abraham, Arabic Wikipedia uses the Arabic form. For the four modern people called Abraham in the table below, its titles write أبراهام three times and إبراهام once. Abraham is not in the table of our name tool, and its sound rules give أبراهام.

How إبراهيم is spelled, letter by letter

إبراهيم has seven letters, read from right to left, starting with the letter إ, alif with hamza below. إ alif with hamza below, ر rāʾ and ا alif never join the letter after them, so إبراهيم always shows three small gaps. Arabic writes only long vowels as letters. The three short vowels are marks that everyday spelling leaves out; إِبْرَاهِيم shows them.

What does Abraham mean?

Abraham means father of many, or is a longer form of Abram, according to Behind the Name. Behind the Name reads the Hebrew ʾAvraham as father of many; Genesis 17:5 tells how God changed his name from Abram to Abraham. إبراهيم keeps the b-r-h-m of the Hebrew and adds a long ī. His son Isaac, إسحاق, has an Arabic form of his own. Abraham was one of the 500 most common names given to boys born in the US in 2024, in the Social Security Administration's 2024 national file, as copied in the usbabynames data package.

Two related names on this site are Isaac in Arabic, إسحاق and Noah in Arabic, نوح. For Arabic names to choose from, browse the Arabic boy names with their meanings, part of our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Write إبراهيم in more fonts and download it

Paste إبراهيم into the box below, or into our Arabic calligraphy generator, to draw it in 12 more fonts and save it as a PNG.

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