Boy names that mean sky
Ten names, which is all the honest ones we can find. The sky is a common noun in every language and a rare given name in most of them — but where it is used, it tends to be used plainly: Korean Haneul and Japanese Sora are the everyday words, handed to a child without decoration.
- AkashAH-kaashSanskrit
Sky, open space, ether — one of the five classical elements, and the ordinary Hindi word for sky.
- HaneulHAH-nuhlKorean
Sky. Native Korean 하늘, written in hangul with no hanja behind it, so the meaning cannot be reinterpreted.
- SoraSOH-rahJapanese
Sky, written 空 — one of the few Japanese names whose meaning is fixed rather than chosen.
- ThienTYENVietnamese
Heaven, the sky. 天 draws a person with the space above the head marked in.
- Kalanikah-LAH-neeHawaiian
The heavens — ka (the) + lani (sky, heaven), which also means high chief.
- IlmariEEL-mah-reeFinnish
From ilma, air and sky. Ilmarinen of the Kalevala forged the vault of the heavens.
- UkkoOOK-koFinnish
Sky and thunder — the highest god of pre-Christian Finland, and still the root of ukkonen, thunder.
- HaoHOWChinese
Vast. Written 昊 it stacks the sun 日 on 天, the sky: the vast heaven.
- HaoyuHOW-yooChinese
浩 vast + 宇, the roof of the world — open space, the cosmos overhead.
- SamiSAH-meeArabic
Elevated, exalted — built on the root s-m-w that also gives samāʾ, sky. The height, not the thing itself.
Vocabulary names, sky gods and the words for what is up there
The plain-vocabulary sky. Haneul and Sora belong to a modern habit — Korean and Japanese parents taking an ordinary noun and registering it as a name. Haneul is unusually safe as meanings go, because it is pure Korean with no Chinese characters behind it to be reinterpreted; almost every other Korean boy's name shifts meaning depending on which hanja the family picks. Sanskrit Akash works the same way in Hindi, where ākāśa is both a classical element and the word you use for the weather.
The sky with a god in it. Finnish gives two: Ukko was the sky and thunder deity himself, and Ilmari comes from ilma, air, by way of the Kalevala smith who hammered out the dome of the heavens. Hawaiian Kalani means the heavens and, in the same breath and the same dictionary entry, the royal chief — Hawaiian rank and sky are one idea. Vietnamese Thien is heaven in the Chinese sense, which includes what heaven decides.
Close, but not quite sky. A few names orbit this meaning without landing on it, and they are worth knowing. Tsubasa is a wing; Peng is the mythical bird of the Zhuangzi whose wings cover the sky; Atlas holds the sky up rather than being it. For weather instead of the vault itself, Thor is thunder outright, Shant and Kidlat are lightning in Armenian and Tagalog, and Zephyr, Phong and Bora are three kinds of wind.