Boy names that mean gold
This is the shortest list on the site, and it is short because gold is one of the rarest things for a boy's name to actually mean. Five names qualify. Everything else usually offered under this heading means wealth, or treasure, or a treasurer — near neighbours, covered further down, but not the metal.
- Abanouba-ba-NOOBCoptic
Father of gold. Noub is the ancient Egyptian nbw, gold, surviving into Coptic and still in use in Cairo and Assiut.
- Aureliusaw-REE-lee-usLatin
Golden, from aureus and aurum. The nomen of the gens Aurelia, worn by a philosopher-emperor.
- Aurelioow-RAY-lee-ohItalian
Golden — the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese heir of Aurelius, and the one still in daily use.
- Crisostomokree-SOHS-toh-mohGreek
Golden-mouthed, meaning a superb speaker: chrysós (gold) + stóma (mouth).
- KaneKAYNJapanese
Three unrelated names share this spelling; the Japanese one is kane, written 金 — gold, or metal generally.
Five that mean gold, and the near neighbours worth knowing
Latin is the main road. Aurum gives the adjective aureus, which gives the Roman clan name behind Aurelius and its living Italian and Spanish form Aurelio. Marcus Aurelius is the reason the longer form still reads as serious rather than ornamental. Greek supplies Crisostomo, which is not a birth name at all in origin but an epithet — golden-mouthed, awarded to John of Antioch for his preaching and used as a given name in Spain and the Philippines ever since.
Egypt supplies the oldest. Abanoub contains noub, the Coptic descendant of ancient Egyptian nbw, a word already thousands of years old when the last hieroglyphs were carved. Coptic families in Egypt still give it, after the child martyr of Nehisa. At the other end of the world, Japanese Kane is 金, gold or metal — though the same four letters are also an Irish surname from cath, battle, and a Welsh word meaning beautiful, so the meaning depends entirely on the family.
The near neighbours. If five is not enough, the adjacent meanings are richer than the metal itself. Kasper, Jasper, Jesper and Cas all descend from a word for a treasurer, which is how tradition explains the Magus who carried the gold — the derivation is a leading guess rather than a fact, and the pages say so. Melchor is his companion. Bao is treasure outright in Vietnamese and Chinese, and Finnish Aarni is treasure buried in a forest. For colour rather than metal, Vietnamese Hoang is yellow — the imperial yellow no commoner was allowed to wear.