Boy names that mean star
Nine names, and the list stops there deliberately. Most “star names” in circulation are either girls' names, constellation labels borrowed wholesale, or wishful glosses on words that mean something else. These nine have a genuine claim, and two of them get an asterisk in the entry itself.
- HōkūHOH-kooHawaiian
Star — the general Hawaiian word, with no second meaning to argue about.
- DhruvDROOVSanskrit
Fixed, immovable — and the name of the Pole Star, the dhruva-tārā, the one point the sky turns around.
- TariqTAH-rikArabic
The one who knocks after dark. Surah 86 lifts the word into the sky and applies it to a piercing star.
- TarekTAH-rekArabic
The Egyptian spelling of the same name and the same star of the night.
- Keyvankay-VAHNPersian
Saturn, from Akkadian kayamānu, “the steady one” — the slowest of the visible planets.
- KarthikKAR-thikTamil
He of the Krittikas — the Pleiades, the six stars that nursed the infant war god.
- Bahrambah-RAHMPersian
Strictly, victory. But Persian astronomy gave the planet Mars to the same divinity, and Iranians still call Mars Bahram.
- Orionoh-RY-unGreek
The hunter of the winter constellation. The word itself has no secure Greek derivation — the sky supplies the meaning.
- SterlingSTUR-lingEnglish
One derivation is Old English steorra, star, for the small star struck on early Norman pennies. Not settled.
Named stars, named planets, and the near misses
The unambiguous ones. Hawaiian Hōkū is the plain noun. Dhruv is Sanskrit for immovable, which Indian astronomy applied to the obvious candidate — the one star the whole sky appears to rotate around — and the boy of the Puranas who was fixed there is why the name is common. Tariq and its Egyptian spelling Tarek are unusual in coming with their own definition attached: the Quran asks what al-Tariq is and answers, the piercing star.
Planets count as stars in most languages. Keyvan is Saturn and Bahram is Mars, both by way of the Persian habit of assigning a planet to a divinity. Karthik points at a whole cluster, the Pleiades, and gets its name from the six stars imagined as six nurses. Orion is a constellation with an unknown etymology, which is honest but unusual: the name means whatever the sky means.
The ones that did not make it. Saif is Arabic for sword, and the star Saiph in Orion's foot is named after the same word rather than the other way round. Arturo is Spanish for Arcturus, but the name is Arthur. Armenian Hayk is what Armenians call the constellation English calls Orion, and Hungarian Csaba rides home along the Milky Way in legend — in both cases the sky borrowed the man's name, not the reverse. Stellan looks like Latin stella and is not from it. If you want the light rather than the point of light, try light or bright.