Ad-Din


Ad-Din is a suffix component of some Arabic names in the construct case, meaning 'the religion/faith/creed', e.g. Saif ad-Din. Varieties are also used in non-Arabic names throughout the Muslim world, It is used as a family name-suffix by some royal Muslim families, including the imperial Seljuks, Walashmas, and Mughals.
It is used as a traditional naming pattern among many South Asian Muslim families of various origins. Many Hyderabadi Muslim families also use it, and many of Hyderabadis belong to the Urdu-speaking Muhajir ethnic group of Pakistan, including them.
The Arabic spelling in its standard transliteration is al-Din. Due to the phonological rules involving the "sun letter", the Arabic letter د is an assimilated letter of the Arabic definite article ال. This leads to the variant phonetic transliteration ad-Din. The first noun of the compound must have the ending -u, which, according to the assimilation rules in Arabic, assimilates the following a-, thus manifesting into ud-Din in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. However, all modern Arabic vernaculars lack the noun endings. Thus, the vowel of the definite article in them is pronounced in full as either a or e. At the same time, the Arabic short vowel u is rendered as short o in Persian, thus od-din.
In practice, romanizations of Arabic names containing this element may vary greatly, including:
  • al-Din, ad-Din, -addin, -adin
  • el-Din, -eldin, -eddin
  • ud-Din, -uddin, -uddeen
  • -eddine
  • -ettin
  • -od-din
  • Uddin
Examples of names including this element are:
In modern times in English-speaking environments, the name Uddin has sometimes been used as if it was a separate surname. An example is: