Boy names that mean water
This page keeps to fresh water and to water in the abstract: springs, pools, rain, moisture, the stuff itself. Salt water has its own list at ocean, and named rivers at river. Hebrew, Arabic and Korean carry most of the load.
- MosesMOH-zizHebrew
Drawn out of the water, from mashah, to draw out — though many scholars prefer Egyptian ms, born of.
- Moisésmoy-SESSSpanish
The Spanish Moses, with the same two competing derivations behind it.
- MusaMOO-sahArabic
The Arabic Moses, a prophet in the Qur'an and a top-tier name from Turkey to northern Nigeria.
- Movsesmov-SESSArmenian
Armenian Moses — borne by Movses Khorenatsi, the fifth-century historian of Armenia.
- Bilalbih-LAHLArabic
Moisture, wetting, refreshment — from the root b-l-l, which covers damping and the easing of thirst.
- RayyanRY-yahnArabic
Well-watered, luxuriant, no longer thirsty — said of a garden after rain as readily as of a person.
- VarunVAH-roonSanskrit
Lord of the waters. Varuna keeps the cosmic order and binds wrongdoers; the name's own root has never been settled.
- HaoHOWChinese
浩 joins the water radical 氵 to 告 and begins as water past measuring — which is how it came to mean vast.
- HaoranHOW-rahnChinese
浩 (overflowing, said first of water) + 然 (in that manner): immense, and unforced about it.
- JuwonJOO-wunKorean
The hanja decide; 柱源 reads pillar and wellspring, 源 being the source a stream rises from.
- DoyunDOH-yoonKorean
One common writing sets 道, the way, against 潤 — to moisten, to enrich, the character with water in it.
- LincolnLINK-unEnglish
Settlement by the pool: Brittonic lindo-, a pool or lake, plus Latin colonia. Currently #69 in the U.S.
- WeldonWEL-dunEnglish
Old English wella, a spring or stream, plus dūn, a hill: the hill the water comes out of.
Two flavours of water
Water as rescue and refreshment. The Moses family — Moisés, Musa, Movses — all rest on a baby pulled out of the Nile, and all come with an honest caveat: the Egyptian derivation is at least as likely as the Hebrew one. Bilal and Rayyan approach it from a desert language, where the useful sense of water is not depth but relief — moisture, a watered garden, thirst ended.
Water as source and expanse. Juwon and Doyun take Korean characters built around water — the wellspring, the act of moistening — while Hao and Haoran use the Chinese 浩, a graph that literally carries the water radical and originally described floodwater. Their modern gloss is “vast”, and the vastness is water's.
Water in the landscape. Lincoln is a pool and Weldon a spring, both fossilised inside English place names, and Varun is the Vedic god who governs the whole of it. If you want the sea instead, ocean is the page; for moving water with a name of its own, river.