Rachel in Arabic: راحيل, رايتشل, and Which One to Use

Rachel in Arabic is راحيل (Rāḥīl), the wife of Jacob and mother of Joseph in the Arabic Bible. For an English speaker named Rachel, Arabic spells the sound, and our name tool gives رايتشل (Raytshel). Arabic Wikipedia shows three spellings for three modern Rachels, so the sound version is not fixed.

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 راحيل and رايتشل differ.

Rachel in Arabic calligraphy, in three styles

Renders of راحيل and رايتشل, in Amiri, Lemonada and Alkalami, drawn straight from the font files.

راحيل or رايتشل: which spelling should you use?

Use راحيل for the biblical Rachel and for an Arab woman of that name; Wiktionary lists it as a given name and labels it for Rachel, Jacob's wife, in Judaism and Islam. For an English speaker, the titles in the table further down disagree: راشيل for Rachel Carson, ريتشل for Rachel Weisz and رايتشل for Rachel McAdams. رايتشل, the tool's spelling, writes the English ay and ch most closely.

How Arabic Wikipedia writes people called Rachel

For the matriarch Rachel, Arabic Wikipedia uses the Arabic form. For the three modern people called Rachel in the table below, its titles write راشيل once, ريتشل once and رايتشل once. Our name tool gives رايتشل, the spelling of Rachel McAdams's article.

How راحيل is spelled, letter by letter

راحيل has five letters, read from right to left, starting with the letter ر, rāʾ. ر rāʾ and ا alif never join the letter after them, so راحيل always shows two small gaps. Arabic writes only long vowels as letters. The two short vowels are marks that everyday spelling leaves out; رَاحِيل shows them.

What does Rachel mean?

Rachel means ewe, according to Behind the Name. The Hebrew Raḥel means ewe. راحيل keeps the breathy ḥ of the Hebrew, which English lost, so the English and Arabic forms sound far apart. Her son is Joseph in Arabic, يوسف. Rachel was one of the 500 most common names given to girls 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 Hannah in Arabic, حنة and Eve in Arabic, حواء. For Arabic names to choose from, browse the Arabic girl names with their meanings, part of our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Write راحيل in more fonts and download it

Paste راحيل 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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