Arabic name

Name structure

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• Md. Dinar Ibn Raihan
• Mohd. Umair Tanvir
• Md. Osman

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Common naming practices

Arab Muslim

• ',
• '
• '

Arab Christian

• Arabic versions of Christian names, e.g. saints' names: for Peter, Boulos for Paul.
• Names of Greek, Armenian, and Aramaic origin, which are also used by ethnically non-Arab Christians such as Armenians, Assyrians, or Copts.
• Use of European names, especially names French and English names. This is a recent convention for Christian Arabs, which mainly started with the [Sykes–Picot Agreement|British and French mandates in the Levant]. Examples include George Habash, Michel Aflaq, and Charles Helou.
• Names in honor of Jesus Christ:

  Dynastic or family name

Example

Common mistakes

• Separating "the X of Y" word combinations :
• * With "Abdul": Arabic names may be written "Abdul ", but "Abdul" means "servant of the" or "follower of the" and is not, by itself, a name. Thus for example, to address Abdul-Rahman bin Omar al-Ahmad by his given name, one says "Abdul-Rahman", not merely "Abdul". If he introduces himself as "Abdul-Rahman", one does not say "Mr. Rahman" ; instead it would be Mr. al-Ahmad, the latter being the family name. Therefore, it is better to write "Abdul Rahman" as "abdu r-rahmān" and "abdul ghafār" as "abdu l-ghafār".
• * People not familiar with Arabic sandhi in iḍāfah: Habībullāh = "beloved of God "; here a person may in error report the man's name as "forename Habib, surname Ullah". Likewise, people may confuse a name such as Jalālu-d-dīn as being "Jalal Uddin", or "Mr. Uddin", when "Uddin" is not a surname, but the second half of a two-word name. To add to the confusion, some immigrants to Western countries have adopted Uddin as a surname, although it is grammatically incorrect in Arabic outside the context of the associated "first name". Even Indian Muslims commit the same error. If a person's name is Abd-ul-Rahim, others may call him Mr. Abdul which would sound quite odd to a native speaker of Arabic.
• Not distinguishing ' from ': Some Arabic names include the Arabic word '. Here, ⟨ʻ⟩ represents the ayin, a voiced pharyngeal fricative, ⟨ʾ⟩ represents the hamza, a glottal stop, and ⟨l⟩ is spelled and pronounced at ordinary length, /l/. In ', the l is written twice and pronounced twice as long, as /l/ or /ll/. In Arabic pronunciation, ' and ' are clearly different. But Europeans, Iranians, and Indians may not pronounce some Arabic sounds as a native Arabic speaker would, and thus tend to pronounce them identically. For example, the name ' is sometimes misspelled as ' by Europeans and Indians. There is another name ', which uses both distinctly. Therefore, the name "علاء" must be written in Latin in the form of "Halāʾ " or "Halaa'e" to differentiate it between "Allāh" the name of God in Arabic, and also the female name آلاء "Ālāʾ " Which means "blessings".
• Taking ' or ' for a middle name: As stated above, these words indicate the order of the family chain. English-speakers often confuse them with middle names, especially when they are written as "Ben", as it is the case in some countries. For example, Sami Ben Ahmed would be mistakenly addressed as Mr. Ben Ahmed. To correctly address the person, one should use Mr. Sami or Mr. Sami Ben Ahmed.
• Grammar: As between all languages, there are differences between Arabic grammar and the grammar of other languages. Arabic forms noun compounds in the opposite order from Indo-Iranian languages, for example. During the war in Afghanistan in 2002, a BBC team found in Kabul an internally displaced person whose name they stated as "Allah Muhammad". This may be a misspelling for ', for if not, by the rules of Arabic grammar, this name means "the Allah who belongs to Muhammad", which, assuming the person is an Arabic speaking Muslim would be unacceptable religiously. However, by the rules of Iranian languages and most languages of India, this name does mean "Muhammad who belongs to Allah", being the equivalent of the Arabic "Muhammadullah". Most Afghans speak Iranian languages. Such Perso-Arab or Indo-Arab multilingual compound names are not uncommon in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan. There is, for example, the Punjabi name Allah-Ditta which joins the Arabic Allah with the Punjabi Ditta "given".

  Arab family naming convention

• Saleh is his personal name, and the one that his family and friends would call him by.
• ibn and bin translates as "son of", so Tariq is Saleh's father's name.
• ibn Khalid means that Tariq is the son of Khalid, making Khalid the paternal grandfather of Saleh.
• al-Fulan would be Saleh's family name.

Biblical names and their Arabic equivalent

• The popular romanization of the Arabized and Hebrew names are written first, then the standardized romanization are written in oblique. Arabized names may have variants.
• If a literal Arabic translation of a name exists, it will be placed after the final standardized romanization.
• If an Arabic correlation is ambiguous, ' will be placed following the name in question.
• El, the Hebrew word for strength/might or deity, is usually represented as īl in Arabic, although it carries no meaning in classical and modern Arabic. The only exception is its usage in the Iraqi Arabic.

• : There are two versions of the name Jesus: Yasuʿ is the Christian version, as used in the Bible, while ʿĪsa is the Muslim version, as used in the Qur'an.
• : Similarly, there are two versions of the name John: Yuḥannā is the Christian version, while Yaḥya is the Muslim version. They have different triconsonantal roots: Ḥ-N-N vs Ḥ-Y-Y. Yuḥannā is cognate with the original Hebrew . Note that Yuḥannā may refer to either John the Baptist or John the Apostle, whereas Yaḥya refers specifically to John the Baptist.

  Arabic names in English

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