Welsh boy names
Welsh spelling is not difficult, it is just unfamiliar — and unlike English it is almost perfectly regular, so once you know what four pairs of letters are doing you can read every name on this page aloud. That guide comes first, because it is the thing most Welsh name lists leave out. Then the native names, the anglicised ones, and where Bowen, Price and Powell came from.
Welsh names in the U.S. top 100
- #31OwenOH-enWelsh
Well-born, also read as young warrior. The anglicised Owain, and by a distance the most successful Welsh name in America.
- #41DylanDIL-unWelsh
Of the sea, great tide. A sea-child in the Mabinogi who swims the moment he is born, and Dylan Thomas long afterwards.
- #87ArthurAR-thurBrittonic
Traditionally glossed as bear, though the derivation is genuinely disputed and Latin Artorius is the main rival. Welsh tradition has the earliest claim on the man.
The four Welsh letters English does not have
Welsh treats these pairs as single letters — they have their own places in the Welsh alphabet, which is why a Welsh dictionary files Llewelyn after Lyn rather than under L. None of them is a random obstacle; each is one sound.
- ll — not an L, not thl, and definitely not cl. Put your tongue where you would for an L and blow air past one side of it. English simply does not own the sound, so the hl- in Llewelyn (hlew-EL-in) is an approximation rather than a transcription.
- dd — the soft, voiced th of "the". Dafydd is DAH-vith with that ending, and Gruffudd is GRIF-ith.
- ff — the hard f of "off". A single f in Welsh is a v, which is the other half of the same rule: Ifan is EE-van, and it is why Dafydd has a v in the middle.
- rh — a voiceless r, the same tongue position with breath pushed through instead of voice. Rhys and Rhodri both open with it. No Welsh speaker will mind an ordinary R.
Two more rules finish the job. W and y are vowels — w is an "oo", so Huw is HYOO and Gwyn is GWIN. And the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable, almost without exception: tal-YES-in, hlew-EL-in, MAY-ree-on. English speakers instinctively hit the first syllable, and that single habit accounts for most mispronounced Welsh names.
Traditional Welsh names
Native forms, most of them in continuous use in Wales rather than revived. Several have no settled etymology, and the honest ones say so.
- DafyddDAH-vithWelsh
Beloved — the Welsh David. Dewi is the same biblical name arriving centuries earlier, and Dewi Sant is the patron saint of Wales.
- GruffuddGRIF-ithWelsh
Built on udd, lord. The first element has never been explained, so "strong lord" is interpretation, not translation.
- RhysREESWelsh
Ardour, enthusiasm, traditionally glossed. The Lord Rhys ruled Deheubarth in the twelfth century and held the first recorded eisteddfod.
- RhodriROD-reeWelsh
Traditionally parsed as rhod, wheel, plus rhi, ruler. Rhodri Mawr held more of Wales by the 870s than anyone had for centuries.
- Llewelynhlew-EL-inWelsh
Usually read through llyw, leader, though the etymology is open. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, killed in 1282, was the last native Prince of Wales.
- OwainOH-wineWelsh
The Welsh original behind Owen. Owain Glyndŵr led the last great Welsh rising from 1400 and was never captured.
- EmrysEM-rissWelsh
Immortal — the Welsh Ambrosius, the prophetic boy who confounds Vortigern's builders in the Historia Brittonum.
- Taliesintal-YES-inWelsh
Radiant brow, from tâl and iesin. The sixth-century poet named in the earliest Welsh sources; the first voice Welsh literature has.
- IestynYES-tinWelsh
Just, fair — the Welsh Justin, and a common enough choice in Wales that nobody there treats it as unusual.
- IeuanYAY-anWelsh
Yahweh is gracious, a Welsh form of John. Ifan and Ianto are the same name worn down in different directions.
- IfanEE-vanWelsh
Yahweh is gracious. Say the single f as a v and you have said Evan, which is exactly where Evan comes from.
- IantoYAN-tohWelsh
The affectionate Welsh diminutive of the same John — Ifan plus the pet suffix -to.
- GwilymGWIL-imWelsh
Resolute protector — the Welsh William. Dafydd ap Gwilym is generally held to be the finest poet Wales has produced.
- HuwHYOOWelsh
Heart, mind, spirit — the Welsh spelling of Hugh, with w doing a vowel's work.
- TomosTOM-osWelsh
Twin — Thomas in Welsh spelling, and one of the gentler ways into the tradition.
- GwynGWINWelsh
White, fair, and also blessed or holy. Gwyn ap Nudd rules the otherworld in Welsh myth; Wyn is the form the word takes inside a longer name.
- CaiKYEWelsh
Not securely known; traditionally traced to Roman Gaius. Cai is Arthur's foster-brother, whom English turned into Sir Kay.
- MadocMAD-okWelsh
Fortunate, good — mad with the suffix -og. The prince said to have reached America in 1170 is fine legend and poor history.
- GethinGETH-inWelsh
Dusky, swarthy, dark. A descriptive byname that hardened into a first name.
- OsianOSH-anWelsh
Fawn, little deer — the sense belongs to the Irish Oisín. Wales borrowed the name and respelled it to its own rules.
Anglicised names and the ap surnames
These are what happened when Welsh met English record-keeping. Several are patronymics with the ap fused on the front; the rest are Welsh names filed down until an English clerk could spell them.
- EvanEV-unWelsh
God is gracious, by way of John. Ifan written the way an English ear heard it.
- BowenBOH-unWelsh
Son of Owain: ab Owain run together until the clerks wrote it as one word.
- EllisEL-issWelsh
From Elias, "my God is Yahweh" — and in Wales also from the native Elisedd, "kindly".
- GriffithGRIF-ithWelsh
Gruffudd in English spelling, keeping the udd, lord, at the end and the same unexplained first half.
- GriffinGRIF-inWelsh
The lighter descendant of Gruffudd, reinforced by the eagle-lion of the bestiaries — two sources arriving at one spelling.
- MorganMOR-ganWelsh
Built on mor, sea; the second element is the disputed one. A boys' name in Wales for centuries before America made it unisex.
- TrevorTREV-urWelsh
Great settlement, from tref and mawr. Trefor is the Welsh spelling and there are several villages of the name.
- VaughnVAWNWelsh
Small, the younger. From bychan in its mutated form fychan — the tag that told a son apart from his father.
- KendrickKEN-drikWelsh
Chief man, or royal power — Welsh Cynwrig and Old English Cyneric collapsed into a single spelling.
- IvorEYE-vorWelsh
Traditionally yew warrior or archer. Norse Ívarr naturalised in Wales as Ifor and came back out in English dress.
- GarethGA-rethWelsh
Unsettled. Malory's knight gave Wales a name that arrived without a dictionary entry and is now thoroughly at home.
- IdrisID-rissWelsh
Ardent lord in Welsh, and separately a prophet's name in the Qur'an. Cadair Idris, Idris's chair, is the mountain above Dolgellau.
How Welsh naming works
Wales identified a man by his father rather than by his family, using ap before a consonant and ab before a vowel: Dafydd ap Gwilym, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and in the genealogies a chain that could run back five or six generations without a surname anywhere in it. Hereditary surnames arrived late, spreading under English administration from the sixteenth century onward, and when they did the little word fused to whatever came after it. Ab Owain became Bowen; ap Hywel became Powell; ap Rhys became Price and Prees; ab Evan became Bevan; ap Richard became Pritchard. Every one of those surnames is a Welshman's father with the join sanded off.
Because that freeze caught a very small pool of given names at one moment, Wales ended up with the narrowest surname stock in Britain: Jones, Davies, Williams, Evans and Thomas still head the list, and Welsh communities got by for generations on by-names — Jones the Post, Jones the Milk — because the surname carried no information at all. The compensating movement has been in first names. Since the mid-twentieth century Welsh parents have gone back to native forms in numbers, choosing Rhys over Reece and Dafydd over David, and reviving names like Osian, Iestyn and Taliesin that no English record book had ever bothered to respell. The origins index has the neighbouring traditions.