Arabic Name Generator: Boy and Girl Names With Their Meanings

Arabic Vocabulary Lists > Arabic Name Generator

This Arabic name generator gives you a real boy or girl name with its Arabic script, meaning and root, or builds a full classical name such as Abu Hasan Yusuf ibn Khalid ibn ʿUmar al-Halabi. All 174 names come from a checked list, and each spelling and meaning links to the Wiktionary or Wikipedia entry it came from.

Pick a gender and a style, then press the button. Every press draws another name. In full-name mode the generator adds a father, a grandfather and, if you leave them ticked, a kunya and a nisba. Transliteration uses plain English letters, the same scheme as our guide to Arabic last names and their meanings: ʿ is the letter ع (ʿayn), ʾ is a glottal stop, and a doubled letter is a doubled consonant. Long vowels are not marked, so check the vowelled Arabic under each first name for those.

How the full-name builder puts an Arabic name together

A classical Arabic name runs in this order: kunya, ism, nasab, nisba. That is Abu or Umm with a child's name, then the given name, then ibn or bint with the father's name, then an adjective for a place or tribe. Three of those four parts change with the gender of the person named, and the generator applies each change. The table shows the same name built for a boy and for a girl.

Read in full, the boy is أبو حسن يوسف بن خالد بن عمر الحلبي and the girl is أم حسن مريم بنت خالد بن عمر الحلبية. Between two names, ibn is written بن without its first letter, which is how our last names page writes the lineage of the historian Ibn Khaldun. The feminine nisba follows the grammar rule Wikipedia gives in its article on the nisba: -iyy for a man and -iyyah for a woman.

That is the classical pattern. A modern family name works differently. Wikipedia's article on Arabic names notes that almost all Arab countries had stopped writing ibn and bint by the 1990s, so Fatimah bint Abdullah ibn Omar al-Rashid would be Fatimah Abdullah Omar al-Rashid, with the family name unchanged. The same article says a kunya in theory refers to a first-born son or daughter, so the generator picks the child's name from both lists. The 25 nisbas are the place and tribe names on our last names page, with that page's meanings. Bin and bint are also the everyday words in our list of Arabic words for family members.

Arabic boy names with meanings

The 106 Arabic male names below are every name the generator can draw for a boy, sorted A to Z. Muhammad is so common in parts of Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, Wikipedia notes, that it is often shortened to Md. or Mohd. The ʿAbd names pair عبد (ʿabd, servant) with one of God's names, and our list of the 99 names of Allah gives the meaning of each.

Arabic girl names with meanings

The 68 Arabic female names below are every name the generator can draw for a girl. Khadija, ʿAʾisha, Fatima and Zaynab were all names in the Prophet Muhammad's own family, and Maryam, the mother of Jesus, gives her name to the 19th chapter of the Quran. Nur, Ilham and Inas are listed by Wiktionary for both girls and boys, and we keep them here with a note.

How we chose and checked the names

A name is in the generator only if Wiktionary lists it as an Arabic given name for that gender and we could find a meaning for it in a source we fetched. For most names the meaning comes from the same Wiktionary entry. For 16, it comes from a related entry: Halima, for example, is glossed through حليم (halim, patient), the masculine word it is formed from. For 20 names Wiktionary gives no meaning, and we took it from the Wikipedia article on the name. Every table row links its sources, and the root column shows a root only where Wiktionary gives one.

We dropped names we could not check, including some common ones. Bilal, Zayd, Ziyad and Hafsa are all Arabic given names on Wiktionary, but neither Wiktionary nor the Wikipedia articles on those names give a meaning. Asma is out for a different reason: Wiktionary treats أسماء as the plural of اسم, names, while Wikipedia's article on the name says it means supreme. When two sources disagree we leave the name out rather than pick one.

Some names look like English names and are different words. Rayyan (ريان, well-watered) is sometimes spelled Ryan in English, but the English name Ryan is a different word, which our converter writes رايان. Yasamin (ياسمين, jasmine) is the Arabic counterpart of Jasmine, yet the English name spelled by sound comes out جاسمين. The prophets have Arabic forms of their own: Yusuf is Joseph, Ishaq is Isaac and Nuh is Noah. If you want your own English name spelled in Arabic letters rather than an Arabic name, use our converter for writing your name in Arabic.

Using a generated name for a character

For a story or a game, choose the parts that fit the setting, then decide what other characters call the person. The nisba places a character: al-Shami is Levantine or Damascene, and al-Qahtani traces a family to Qahtan, ancestor of the South Arabian tribes. The kunya sets the tone of a scene, since Wikipedia notes that using it "implies a familiar but respectful setting". A long name also gets cut down in use. Ibn Khaldun was known by one link of his nasab, and our last names page shows how that link became a family name.

Once you have a name, you can see it in several styles of Arabic script with our free calligraphy maker for Arabic text, or add up its letters with the abjad calculator for Arabic letter values. For courses and other tools, start from our Arabic learning resources.

Frequently asked questions

What would my Arab name be?

Most English names have no official Arabic version. A few names from the Bible do have a traditional Arabic form: Joseph is Yusuf (يوسف) and Isaac is Ishaq (إسحاق). Otherwise you can spell your own name in Arabic letters with our name converter, or choose an Arabic name you like from the generator on this page and read its meaning first.

How do you make your name in Arabic?

Spell its sounds with Arabic letters, written right to left: Michael is مايكل. Our converter for writing your name in Arabic does this for 212 checked English names. The generator on this page does something else. It gives you a real Arabic name with its meaning, instead of spelling an English one.

What is the prettiest Arabic name?

That comes down to taste, and no source we know of ranks names by beauty. Some names mean beauty itself: Jamila (جميلة, beautiful) for a girl, Jamal (جمال, beauty) and Zayn (زين, beauty) for a boy. Flower names include Zahra (زهرة, flower), Yasamin (ياسمين, jasmine) and Sawsan (سوسن, lily). The Nature and light setting draws from this group.

What are some common Arabic boy names?

Wikipedia notes that Muhammad is so common in parts of Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia that it is often shortened to Md. or Mohd. The names of prophets, such as Ibrahim, Yusuf and Musa, and of early Muslims, such as ʿAli, ʿUmar and Hasan, are in the generator under Prophets and early Islam.

What is the rarest Arabic name?

We could not find a reliable count of Arabic first names, so we cannot say which is rarest. The generator does include names from early Arabian history, such as Luʾayy (لؤي, little wild ox), the name of an ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad.

What does bint mean in an Arabic name?

Bint (بنت) means daughter of, and ibn or bin (بن) means son of. A woman takes bint before her father's name, but the next link is always ibn, because it says whose son her father is: Maryam bint Khalid ibn ʿUmar is Maryam, daughter of Khalid, son of ʿUmar. By the 1990s almost all Arab countries had stopped writing ibn and bint in everyday names, though they can still appear in official documents in some regions.

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