Joseph in Arabic: يوسف, جوزيف, and Which One to Use

Joseph in Arabic is يوسف (Yūsuf), the prophet Joseph of the Quran, both Josephs of the Bible, and a common Arabic name today. Muslims and Arab Christians use the same يوسف. For an English speaker named Joseph, Arabic writes the sound instead: جوزيف (Jozef).

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 يوسف and جوزيف differ.

Joseph in Arabic calligraphy, in three styles

Renders of يوسف and جوزيف, in Amiri, Katibeh and Rakkas, drawn straight from the font files.

يوسف or جوزيف: which spelling should you use?

Use يوسف for the name itself. Surah 12 of the Quran, Yūsuf, tells his story, and Arabic Wikipedia calls Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary, يوسف النجار, Joseph the carpenter. Use جوزيف for an English speaker named Joseph: every modern Joseph in the table further down has it.

How Arabic Wikipedia writes people called Joseph

For the patriarch Joseph and for Saint Joseph, Arabic Wikipedia uses the Arabic form. For the four modern people called Joseph in the table below, its titles write جوزيف four times. Our name tool gives جوزيف, a spelling taken from Arabic Wikipedia.

How يوسف is spelled, letter by letter

يوسف has four letters, read from right to left, starting with the letter ي, yāʾ. One letter, و wāw, never joins the letter after it, so يوسف always shows one small gap. Arabic writes only long vowels as letters. The two short vowels are marks that everyday spelling leaves out; يُوسُف shows them.

What does Joseph mean?

Joseph means he will add, according to Behind the Name. The Hebrew Yosef comes from the root yasaf, to add. يوسف keeps the y and the s and writes the long ū with wāw. Wiktionary lists Yusuf, Yousef, Youssef and Yusef among its romanizations, and our list of Arabic boy names carries it with the meaning Joseph. Joseph was one of the 50 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 Jacob in Arabic, يعقوب and Mary in Arabic, مريم. For Arabic names to choose from, browse the Arabic boy names with their meanings, part of our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Write يوسف in more fonts and download it

Paste يوسف 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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