Egyptian boy names
Egyptian names come in three layers that have almost nothing to do with each other, and mixing them is the standard mistake. There are the pharaonic names, which are historical and not given to children in Egypt today; the Muslim Arabic names that most Egyptians actually carry; and the Coptic Christian names, which descend from the ancient Egyptian language itself. Each layer gets its own section below.
Names Egyptians use today: the Muslim Arabic layer
Arabic arrived with the conquest of 641 and has been the language of Egypt for well over a thousand years. Roughly nine Egyptians in ten are Muslim, and the everyday stock of men's names is Arabic — often in a distinctly Egyptian spelling, because Egyptian Arabic vowels differ from the classical ones and the transliterations follow the local sound.
- AhmedAH-medArabic
Most praiseworthy. Built on the root h-m-d, which also gives Muhammad, Mahmoud and Hamdi.
- Mahmoudmah-MOODArabic
Praised — grammatically the quietest of the family, a passive participle rather than a superlative. Hamada is the everyday Egyptian pet form.
- YoussefYOO-sefArabic
He will add; may God increase. The Egyptian spelling of Yusuf, and one of the most given names in Cairo.
- AmrAMRArabic
Life, long life. Written عمرو with a final letter nobody pronounces, there purely to keep it distinct from Omar.
- TarekTAH-rekArabic
The one who knocks, hence the night visitor; in Surah 86 the word is the piercing star. Gibraltar is Jabal Tariq, Tariq's mountain.
- Hossamhoo-SAHMArabic
A sharp sword — not a sword in general but a keen one, from a root meaning to cut off decisively.
- SeifSAYFArabic
Sword, the plain noun. Saif El-Din, sword of the faith, was a standard Ayyubid and Mamluk honorific.
- Sherifshe-REEFArabic
Noble, highborn. An adjective that became a title in Mecca and then relaxed back into an ordinary Cairo first name.
Coptic Christian names
Copts are Egypt's indigenous Christians, and their names are a separate stock that Muslim families do not use — the difference is audible the moment a name is spoken. The reason this layer belongs on the same page as the pharaohs is that Coptic is not a borrowed liturgical language. It is the final written stage of ancient Egyptian itself, set down in the Greek alphabet plus seven signs kept from demotic, and it is still sung in Coptic churches every week. Abanoub carries noub, gold, which is the ancient Egyptian nbw.
- MinaMEE-naCoptic
Given after Saint Menas, martyred around 309 and patron saint of Egypt. Male in Egypt and female almost everywhere else — Persian, Japanese, Dutch, German and Korean all read it as a girl's name, so weigh that before using it abroad.
- BoutrosBOOT-rossCoptic
Rock — Peter, by way of Greek Petros. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was UN Secretary-General from 1992 to 1996.
- Shenoudashe-NOO-daCoptic
Son of God, from Coptic shēn and nouti. Built from Egyptian words rather than imported from Greek, and with no European version to fall back on.
- Abanouba-ba-NOOBCoptic
Father of gold; the golden one. Apa is the honorific put before a monk or saint, noub the ordinary Coptic word for gold.
- BishoyBISH-oyCoptic
Traditionally glossed "the exalted one", though only the opening pi-, "the", is securely understood. Given after Saint Pishoi of Scetis.
Pharaonic names — historical, not modern
Two things need saying before this list. First, these are not names Egyptian parents give their sons. They belong to kings dead for three thousand years, and using one is a reference rather than a tradition. Second, every pronunciation below is a modern scholarly convention. Egyptian script recorded consonants and left the vowels out, so nobody knows how any of these names were actually said; the vowels in Ramses, Khufu and Amenhotep were supplied by Egyptologists working through Greek and Coptic, and the wobble between Tutankhamun and Tutankhamen exists for exactly that reason.
- Tutankhamuntoo-tan-KAH-munHistorical
Living image of Amun. He was born Tutankhaten and the name was rebuilt around a different god while he was still a boy; his fame rests on an intact tomb found in 1922.
- RamsesRAM-seezHistorical
Ra has fashioned him. Eleven kings used it; Ramesses II reigned about sixty-six years and signed the earliest peace treaty surviving from both sides.
- Akhenatenahk-uh-NAH-tenHistorical
Effective for the Aten, the disc of the sun. A regnal name adopted mid-reign, replacing Amenhotep IV.
- Amenhotepah-mun-HOH-tepHistorical
Amun is content. Four Eighteenth Dynasty kings carried it before the fourth abandoned it.
- ThutmoseTHOOT-mohsHistorical
Born of Thoth. The -mose element is the verb mes, to bear or fashion, the same one inside Ramses.
- AhmoseAH-mohsHistorical
Born of Iah, the moon god. Ahmose I drove out the Hyksos and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty.
- KhufuKOO-fooHistorical
Khnum protects me. The Great Pyramid at Giza is his; the Greeks called him Cheops.
- KhafreKAHF-rayHistorical
He appears like Ra. The second Giza pyramid, and by most accounts the face of the Sphinx.
- Menkauremen-KOW-rayHistorical
Eternal are the souls of Ra. The smallest of the three Giza pyramids belongs to him.
- SneferuSNEF-eh-rooHistorical
He who has made me perfect. Khufu's father, and the king who built more pyramid than anyone else while working out how.
- SetiSET-eeHistorical
He of Set. Named for the god of storms and disorder, which was a less awkward choice then than it reads now.
- Imhotepim-HOH-tepHistorical
He who comes in peace. The one non-royal name here: Djoser's architect, later deified as a god of medicine and equated by the Greeks with Asclepius.
- PhineasFIN-ee-usHebrew
A Hebrew name with an Egyptian etymology rather than an Egyptian name — most often derived from an Egyptian phrase meaning "the Nubian", and borrowed into Hebrew scripture.
How Egyptian naming works
The layers on this page are separated by language, not just by date. Ancient Egyptian was written for roughly three and a half thousand years in hieroglyphs and their cursive descendants, then in the Coptic alphabet, and it died as a spoken language only in the late medieval period. Arabic replaced it after 641. So the pharaonic names and the Coptic ones are the same language at opposite ends of its life, and the Arabic names are an entirely separate tradition that arrived later and now covers the overwhelming majority of the population. That is why Abanoub can contain a word that was old when the pyramids were new while Ahmed, three doors down the same street, contains a Semitic root with no Egyptian history at all.
In practice Egyptians of both faiths use the same naming machinery: a man's second name is his father's given name and his third is his grandfather's, which is how Boutros Boutros-Ghali came by his. Christian and Muslim names almost never cross the line, and a Cairene can place a stranger's community from the first name alone — Mina, Boutros and Shenouda on one side, Ahmed, Mahmoud and Amr on the other. Parents outside Egypt reaching for a pharaonic name should know that they are choosing a reference to a king rather than joining a living tradition, and that the pronunciation they settle on is a scholarly guess with a century or two behind it. The wider Arabic-speaking world is covered under Arabic names, and the rest of the continent under African names, both in the origins index.