Arabic Girl Names: 160 Female Names With Their Meanings

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Arabic Girl Names

Many Arabic girl names are ordinary words with a plain meaning: Layla is night, Nur is light, Amal is hope and Yasamin is jasmine. The finder below lists 160 Arabic female names, for girls and women alike, in vowelled Arabic script, each with its meaning, its root, the Quran verse where the word appears, and a link to the source we checked.

Type a meaning such as light or rose into the search box, or tap a theme. The filters also sort the list by first letter, in Latin or Arabic, and by length. If you want one name drawn at random, our Arabic name generator with meanings uses the same data for the 68 girl names it shares with this list, and builds a full name with bint and Umm if you ask it to.

Arabic girl names from the Quran

Maryam is the only woman the Quran mentions by name, as Wikipedia's article on Mary in Islam notes, and Sura 19 carries her name. The other 17 names in this table are words that appear in a verse: Kawthar is in the first verse of Sura 108, and Fajr, Duha and Shams are each in the first verse of Suras 89, 93 and 91. We checked each word against the verse on Quran.com, and the verse numbers link there.

A word in a verse does not always carry the name's meaning there. Marwa in 2:158 is one of two hills near Mecca, in the verse that names الصَّفَا (al-Safa) and الْمَرْوَة (al-Marwa), and Huda in 2:2 is the guidance the book gives. Salwa is in the list but not in this table. The name means joy, while the السَّلْوَى of 2:57 is a different word spelled the same way: the quails sent down with manna, which Wiktionary traces to Aramaic.

How to read the list

Each row gives the name twice in Arabic: first with its vowel marks, so you can say it, then without them, the way it is printed on a birth certificate or a shop sign. The transliteration is in plain English letters, the same scheme as our name generator and our guide to Arabic last names and their meanings. ʿ stands for the letter ع (ʿayn), ʾ for a glottal stop, and a doubled letter is held longer. Long vowels are not marked, so check the vowelled Arabic for those.

The root column shows the three letters a name is built on, where Wiktionary gives them. رَحْمَة (Rahma, mercy) is built on ر ح م, the same root as الرَّحْمَٰن, the first name of God on our list of the 99 names of Allah. The origin column gives the verse where the word is in the Quran, or the language a borrowed name comes from. Eleven girl names came into Arabic from another language, nine of them from Persian or another Iranian language: Yasamin (jasmine), Nasrin (wild rose) and Fayruz (turquoise) among them.

The source column links every entry we used. Most names are in English Wiktionary as Arabic given names. Where Wiktionary has no meaning, or does not list the name at all, the meaning comes from Behind the Name, a reference site on the etymology of first names. Four meanings are marked as uncertain because the source says "possibly": Hind, Shaymaʾ, Fadwa and Shahrazad.

Notes, spellings and names we left out

Of the 160 names, 63 end in ة (tāʾ marbūṭa), the most common feminine ending: فَاطِمَة (Fatima), جَمِيلَة (Jamila). Another 16 end in ى, as in لَيْلَى (Layla) and سَلْمَى (Salma), and 14 in اء, as in سَنَاء (Sanaʾ). Names such as Maryam, Zaynab and Rim have none of these endings and are girls' names by use alone. On the boys' side the ending is rare, and our list of Arabic boy names with their meanings has only two that end in ة: Hamza and Usama.

Twelve names in this list are also given to boys, and the meaning says so: Nur, Malak, Sabah, Qamar and Shams among them. Latin spellings vary from country to country, so the list shows the spellings our sources give under each name, such as Leila and Laila for Layla, and the search finds a name by any of them. Sara is in the list as سَارَة; our page on Sarah in Arabic, its spellings and its meaning covers that one name in detail.

We left out names whose sources disagree. Asma is not here because Wiktionary treats أسماء as the plural of اسم, names, while Behind the Name gives it as "supreme". Nadia is not here either: Wiktionary vowels it نَادِيَة, while the meaning Behind the Name gives, a call or an announcement, belongs to a different reading. Some common names are missing simply because we found no source for their meaning yet.

Writing a girl's name in Arabic

Arabic is written from right to left, and most letters join the letter after them, so a name looks different from its letters set out one by one. Six letters never join forward: ا د ذ ر ز و. That is why وَرْدَة (Warda, a rose) breaks into separate pieces while جَمِيلَة (Jamila) runs as one line. Our guide to how Arabic letters join in handwriting shows the letters of a name in each of their positions, and the Arabic alphabet chart gives every letter with its sound.

To see a name in calligraphy, paste the Arabic from the list into our free tool that draws Arabic text in calligraphy styles. If the name you want is English, such as Emily or Grace, it has no Arabic meaning: our converter for writing your name in Arabic letters spells it by sound instead.

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