AmharicEthiopian3 syllables
Meaning: he has grown; he has sprouted.
Bekele
| Origin | Amharic (Ethiopia), written in the Geʽez script |
|---|---|
| Meaning | He has grown or he has sprouted — በቀለ bäqqälä, the perfect tense of the verb to germinate |
| Pronunciation | beh-KEH-leh — three syllables, stress in the middle |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100 and almost unknown in America; a standard men’s name in Ethiopia |
| Variants | Beqele, Bäqqälä (scholarly transliterations); feminine Bekelech |
| Nicknames | Rarely shortened in Ethiopia; Bek occurs in English-speaking settings |
| Amharic spelling | በቀለ |
| Often mistaken for | A surname — in Kenenisa Bekele the second name is his father’s given name |
History & meaning
በቀለ bäqqälä is what Amharic says about a seed that has come up. The verb means to sprout, to germinate, to spring from the ground, and the name is that verb in the perfect tense: he has grown. Ethiopian naming leans hard on this vegetal imagery. Abebe is he has flowered, from the word for a flower. Tekle is plant of, the first half of Tekle Haymanot, plant of the faith, the thirteenth-century monk who is among the most venerated saints of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Amharic is a Semitic language written in the Geʽez script, and Bekele shows how it can build a name out of grammar rather than vocabulary: no noun appears in it at all, only a conjugated verb with a third-person subject. It is also one of the Ethiopian names most often mistaken for a surname, because Ethiopians do not inherit family names — the second name is the father’s first name. Kenenisa Bekele, three-time Olympic champion and for fifteen years the world-record holder at both 5,000 and 10,000 metres, is Kenenisa, son of Bekele. His brother Tariku Bekele shares a father, not a family name.
Why parents choose it
Bekele is settled and unshowy in Ethiopia, common enough among men of the twentieth century to feel inherited rather than declared. The metaphor is the appeal: a child as something that has come up out of the ground and kept going. For English speakers it presents no spelling problem, and the stress falls where they expect it, on the middle syllable.
Middle names for Bekele
Bekele Thomas, Bekele Isaac, Bekele Aaron, Bekele Josiah. Three light syllables ending in a vowel will take almost anything, but a middle name that opens on a hard consonant stops the two running into each other. The middle names guide works through the rhythm in detail.
Famous Bekeles
Bekele Geleta, an Ethiopian-Canadian humanitarian, served as Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies from 2008 to 2014. Kenenisa Bekele is the household name, and as above, the Bekele there is his father’s. Keeping that distinction straight matters, because it applies to nearly every Ethiopian name a non-Ethiopian has ever heard: Haile Gebrselassie, Tirunesh Dibaba, Abebe Bikila.
Consider instead
Abebe is the same grammar with the flower rather than the shoot. Tadesse, he has been renewed, keeps the perfect tense and drops the plant imagery. Kebede, he has become weighty, uses the same construction to mean honoured.