Names
The meanings, the patterns, and why one name might be spelled five different ways in English.
Arabic names tend to mean something. Unlike English given names, where most speakers could not say what Margaret or Stephen originally meant, Arabic given names are usually transparent words: كريم (Kariim) is "generous", نور (Nuur) is "light", سلمى (Salmaa) is "peaceful". This is part of why Arabic naming has stayed so productive — parents are choosing words, not picking from a closed list — and why the same names have travelled so widely outside the Arab world. محمد (Muhammad), the name of the Prophet of Islam, is, by most accounts, the most common given name on earth.
If you are reading cold, the most useful pages depend on why you came. For browsing names and their meanings, male names and female names are the main reference. Most common names worldwide shows the names actually carried by the most people — including in non-Arab Muslim countries, where Arabic names predominate. How Arabic names are structured explains the traditional five-part naming system (given name, father's name, grandfather's name, family or tribal name, place or descriptor) — what an ism, a kunya, a nasab, a nisba, and a laqab are, and how all of this collapses on a passport. Why the same name has many spellings answers the question every English-speaking employer of an Arabic-speaking employee eventually asks: why is the same person sometimes Mohammed, sometimes Mohamed, sometimes Muhammad? The answer is that Arabic has sounds and vowel-marking conventions that English does not, so any spelling in Latin letters is an approximation, and there has never been a single agreed approximation.
A note: many Arabic names are religious in origin (Islamic, Christian, or Jewish), and many are not. Arabic-speaking Christians have used names like جورج (Juurj, "George") and مريم (Maryam, "Mary") for as long as Arabic-speaking Muslims have used محمد and فاطمة (FaaTima). We treat the whole tradition.