Arabic Baby Names, With Meanings and Data

Arabic names in the 2025 official figures

Muhammad was the most popular boys' name in England and Wales in 2025, given to 5,957 babies, according to the Office for National Statistics datasets published on 9 July 2026. Mohammed was twentieth with 1,712, and further spellings appear separately further down the same list. Arabic names are not a marginal category in British birth registration; they sit at the top of it.

Meanings below follow published etymological references and, where a name is a Quranic word, the standard transliteration used in scholarly editions. Where a meaning is disputed we say so rather than choosing the most attractive option.

Boys

Girls

Why the same name appears many times over

Arabic is written in a different alphabet and has consonants English does not, so any Latin spelling is a transliteration choice rather than a correct answer. In the ONS 2025 files the same name appears as Muhammad, Mohammed, Mohammad, Muhammed and Mohamed, each ranked separately. Combined, that one name is far ahead of anything else in England and Wales, which is why the published rankings understated it for years before Muhammad reached first place on a single spelling.

The same splitting happens across the list: Aisha and Ayesha, Zahra and Zara, Noor and Nur, Yusuf and Yousef. If you want to know how common a name really is, add the variants together. If you want your child's spelling to stay stable, choose one and use it on every document from the first.

What the figures show

Growth here is broad rather than concentrated

Comparing the ONS 2024 and 2025 files gives two dated points from the same source. Hamza rose from 306 boys to 385, Ibrahim from 694 to 731, Musa from 731 to 798, Omar from 290 to 332, Ismail from 157 to 200 and Zaid from 93 to 110. Among girls, Safa rose from 355 to 425, Dua from 337 to 411, Hana from 254 to 341, Sana from 55 to 70 and Salma from 52 to 63. Very little on this page fell. Set against total registrations, which dropped about 1.5 per cent for boys and 1.8 per cent for girls between the two years, that is genuine growth rather than an artefact.

Several of these names cross faiths

Adam, Maryam, Ibrahim, Musa, Yusuf and Ismail belong to the shared Abrahamic tradition and are used by Muslim, Christian and Jewish families in their respective forms. Layla, Amira and Noor travel further still: Layla went to 833 girls in England and Wales in 2025, and a large share of that is not from Muslim families at all. A name being Arabic in origin says nothing certain about the family that chose it.

How Arabic names are built

Arabic words are formed from three-consonant roots, and most of the names above are ordinary derivatives of one. The root h-m-d produces Muhammad, Ahmed, Hamid and Mahmud, all meaning some version of "praised". The root n-w-r gives Noor and Munir, "light" and "luminous". Amir and Amira are the masculine and feminine of the same word. This is why so many Arabic names come in obvious families, and why a gloss that treats each as unrelated misses how the language works.

On pronunciation, and what we will not do

We have not written a respelling guide. Arabic distinguishes sounds English does not — the emphatic consonants, the pharyngeal ayn and ha, the uvular qaf — and an English respelling either loses them or misrepresents them. The honest options are to learn the sound from a speaker or to accept the anglicised pronunciation openly, and plenty of families reasonably choose the second.

Two practical points follow. First, choose a name whose anglicised form you can live with, because in Britain that is the form the child will mostly hear at school and at work. Second, if a name matters religiously, check the Arabic spelling with someone who reads Arabic rather than working back from a transliteration, because two different Arabic words can land on the same Latin letters and mean quite different things.

Third, be wary of any list that presents an Arabic name's meaning as a single English word without saying where it came from. Bilal and Khadija are both extremely well known and both have contested etymologies; Zara is claimed by two different traditions; Rayan is glossed several ways. Naming practice in Arabic-speaking countries has also always drawn on the Quran, on the companions of the Prophet and on ordinary vocabulary at the same time, so a name can be religious, historical and descriptive at once, and the one-word gloss loses all of that.