Arabic Last Names: What They Mean and Where They Are Found

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Arabic Last Names

Most Arabic last names come from one of five sources: a trade (Haddad, blacksmith), a place (Masri, Egyptian), a tribe (al-Qahtani), a father's name (Hassan) or a description (Asmar, dark-skinned). The table below gives 60 of them in Arabic script, with the meaning, the type of name and the countries where most people who carry each spelling live.

The transliteration column uses plain English letters: ʿ is the letter ع (ʿayn), ʾ is a glottal stop, and a doubled letter is a doubled consonant. There are no dots under the emphatic letters. The spellings column is different. It lists the forms families really use in passports, which is why Khoury, Khouri and Khuri are one name.

The five parts of a traditional Arabic name

A traditional Arabic name has up to five parts: the ism, nasab, laqab, nisba and kunya. Only the ism is a first name in the English sense. Modern Arabic surnames grew out of the other four, and the table below shows each part in the full name of the 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldun, as Wikipedia records it.

He is known by one link of his nasab: Ibn Khaldun, son of Khaldun. Khaldun was the ancestor his family, the Banu Khaldun, was named after, several generations back. This is how a nasab turns into a family name. The chain stops growing and one ancestor's name stays with everyone after him.

Most Arab countries no longer write ibn or bint in official names. A modern Arabic name is usually the given name, then the father's name, then the family name, with the grandfather's name added on some legal documents. The family names in our table started out as nisbas, laqabs and nasabs. Meanings of the five terms are checked against Wiktionary's entries for laqab, nisba and kunya.

60 Arabic last names and their meanings

These 60 Arabic surnames split into 20 trade names, 14 place names, 11 tribal names, 7 names taken from an ancestor's first name and 8 descriptions. Each meaning comes from the word's dictionary entry, linked in the last column. Rows we could not check against a dictionary or encyclopedia entry were left out.

The "most bearers / highest share" column comes from Forebears, a surname database that counts the people who carry each spelling, country by country. The first country has the most bearers. The second is where the name makes up the largest share of the population. Haddad reads "Algeria / Lebanon": more Haddads live in Algeria, but a bigger fraction of Lebanese are Haddads. The figures are for the first spelling listed, and date from 2014.

What the table shows about where Arabic surnames come from

Read down the Forebears column and two things stand out. Twelve of the 20 trade names are densest in Lebanon, Syria or Jordan, and all 11 tribal names have their largest population in Saudi Arabia. Place names are the odd ones: they record where an ancestor came from, and the family has often moved since.

Nine of the 20 trade names reach their highest share of the population in Lebanon: Haddad, Sabbagh, Khoury, Kassab, Tahan, Sayegh, Bitar, Shammas and Kahwaji. Two of those are church titles. خوري (khuri) is a priest and شماس (shammas) is a deacon, so both names point to Christian families.

Place names travel further. Baghdadi has the most bearers in Algeria, and Kurdi, Halabi (from Aleppo) and Homsi (from Homs) all have the most bearers in Saudi Arabia. Some names also crossed into other languages. Dabbagh, tanner, has the most bearers in Iran, and the -ji ending of Kahwaji is Turkish: Wiktionary traces قهوجي (qahwaji, coffee maker) to Ottoman Turkish kahveci.

Arabic also has three surnames that all mean butcher: Kassab (قصاب, qassab), Lahham (لحام, lahham, from لحم lahm, meat) and Jazzar (جزار, jazzar). Many trade names share the pattern of the doubled middle letter with -a- around it, which is the Arabic pattern for a person who does a job. Spot it in haddad, najjar, khayyat and hallaq, and you can often guess a trade name before you look it up. Trade surnames like these also turn up on storefronts and law firms, and our guide to spotting the family name in an Arabic business sign shows how to pick them out.

What Al, El, Bin, Ben and Abu mean in Arabic last names

The prefixes in Arabic surnames are ordinary Arabic words: al- is "the", Al is "family of", bin and bint are "son of" and "daughter of", and Abu and Umm are "father of" and "mother of".

ال (al-) is the Arabic article, so al-Haddad is "the blacksmith" and al-Masri is "the Egyptian". El- is the same word spelled the way Egyptians and Levantines say it, which gives Elmasry and El-Hage. Many families drop it in English, so al-Masri, Masri and Elmasry are one name.

Al with a capital and a space is a different word, آل (Al), which Wiktionary glosses as family. It names a house. The Al Nuaimi, written آل النعيمي, are the ruling family of Ajman in the UAE.

بن (bin, ibn) means son of and بنت (bint) means daughter of. These are the same words that build Arabic family and kinship words such as ibn ʿamm, cousin. In North African surnames it is usually written Ben and joined to the name. Benali (son of Ali) has the most bearers in Algeria, and Benjelloun is concentrated in Morocco.

أبو (Abu) is father of, and أم (Umm) is mother of. A kunya can harden into a family name. أبو غزالة (Abu Ghazala), father of the gazelle, is a surname whose bearers live mostly in Egypt and Palestine.

Notes and common mistakes with Arabic surnames

Most confusion about Arabic surnames comes from spelling. One Arabic name can have five English forms, and the meaning of a name says more about an ancestor than about the person carrying it.

One Arabic name, many English spellings

There is no single correct English spelling of an Arabic surname. Each family settled on its own, and dialect explains many of the differences. Egyptians say the letter ج as a hard g, which is why حجازي (hijazi, from the Hejaz) is Hegazy in Cairo and جزار (jazzar) becomes Gazzar. Spellings with ch, such as Chammas for Shammas and Chami for Shami, follow French, where ch is the English sh sound. Our guide to the Arabic dialects explains where each sound shift happens. To get one consistent romanization of any name, paste the Arabic into our Arabic transliteration converter.

A surname describes an ancestor

A Haddad today is no more likely to be a blacksmith than an English Smith is. Asmar (dark-skinned), Tawil (tall) and Atrash (deaf) each described one person, generations ago, and the name stuck to his children.

Abd- names need their second half

عبد (ʿabd) means servant, so Abdullah is "servant of God" and ʿAbd al-Rahman is "servant of the Most Merciful". Abdul on its own means "servant of the", which is not a complete name in Arabic. The second half is one of God's names, such as al-Rahman, and our list of the 99 names of Allah gives the meaning of each.

Last names are only half of a name. For the first half, our tool for writing your English name in Arabic spells common first names in Arabic script.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Lebanese last name?

Many Lebanese last names are Arabic trade names, and some are Christian clergy titles. Of the 60 surnames in our table, Khoury (priest), Sayegh (goldsmith), Shammas (deacon) and Kahwaji (coffee maker) have more bearers in Lebanon than in any other country, and a higher share of the population there than anywhere else, according to Forebears. Haddad, Sabbagh, Kassab, Tahan and Bitar also reach their highest share of the population in Lebanon.

What are some common last names in Egypt?

Of the 60 surnames in our table, Forebears counts the most bearers in Egypt for Najjar (carpenter), Sabbagh (dyer), Kassab (butcher), Tahan (miller), Elmasry (the Egyptian), Hegazy (from the Hejaz), Hassan, Mahmoud, Khalil and Mansour. Egyptian spellings often write the Arabic letter jim as g, as in Hegazy and Gazzar, and the article as El-, as in Elmasry.

What are common Saudi last names?

Saudi last names are often tribal: al- plus the tribe's name plus an -i ending. Al-Qahtani, al-Otaibi, al-Ghamdi, al-Zahrani, al-Harbi, al-Shammari, al-Mutairi, al-Anazi, al-Dosari and al-Tamimi all have more bearers in Saudi Arabia than in any other country in Forebears' counts. Trade names such as Khayat (tailor) and Halwani (sweet maker) are also concentrated there.

What are some traditional Arabic names?

A traditional Arabic name is a chain of up to five parts: the ism (given name), the nasab (ibn or bint, son or daughter of, followed by the father's and grandfather's names), the laqab (a title or nickname), the nisba (an adjective ending in -i that names a place, tribe or trade) and the kunya (Abu or Umm, father or mother of, plus a child's name). The historian Ibn Khaldun's full name has all five.

What does Al mean in Arabic last names?

Written al- with a hyphen, it is the Arabic word for the (ال), so al-Haddad means the blacksmith. Written Al with a space, as in Al Nuaimi, the ruling family of Ajman, it is a different word, آل, meaning family of. El- is the same article as al-, spelled the way it is said in Egypt and the Levant, as in Elmasry.

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