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Hebrew Middle Names

80 Hebrew names with meanings and pronunciation — the tradition that gave English half its first names, and that has its own rules about who a child may be named for.

Hebrew names arrive in English twice over. The first wave came through Greek and Latin translations of the Bible and was reshaped on the way, which is why Yaakov turned into Jacob and then into James, Yosef into Joseph, Moshe into Moses, Shlomo into Solomon, Chana into Hannah, Rivka into Rebecca and Elisheva into Elizabeth. Those forms are now so thoroughly English that nobody hears them as borrowed. The second wave is the Hebrew name kept as Hebrew — Ezra, Asher, Talia, Noa, Eitan — which is a much more recent taste and, in a middle name, an unusually good one, because the middle slot tolerates a name that a teacher would stumble over. Many families run both at once, an English first name and the Hebrew original behind it.

The custom that shapes real decisions is who the child is named for, and here two Jewish traditions genuinely disagree. Ashkenazi families — Central and Eastern European — name a child after a relative who has died, and consider it unlucky to name for someone living; a baby born after a grandmother's death may carry her name within the year. Sephardi and Mizrahi families do the reverse, honoring living grandparents, so that a grandfather may hold his namesake. Neither is a rule of law and plenty of families blend them, but if two sides of a family are pulling in opposite directions over a name, this is usually why. There is also a soft version widely used in North America: rather than repeating the name outright, parents keep only its first letter or its sound, so a great-grandmother Sarah yields a Sadie or a Samantha, and a Shmuel yields a Sawyer. The Hebrew name itself can then go in the middle slot, exact and unaltered, where it does not have to survive a first day at school.

Alongside the legal name, most observant families give a shem kodesh, a Hebrew name used for religious purposes — called to the Torah, written into a marriage contract, said in a prayer for healing. It is formed as a patronymic or matronymic: X ben Y, "son of," or X bat Y, "daughter of," with the parent's Hebrew name following. That is structurally a middle position doing lineage work rather than decoration, and it is close kin to the Arabic nasab and the Russian patronymic; our guide to middle-name traditions worldwide lays the three side by side. If you are choosing a Hebrew middle name for a child who will also have a Hebrew name, it is worth checking whether you want them to be the same word.

Transliteration is the practical headache, and there is no single right answer. Hebrew has two sounds English lacks. The letter chet is a rasp from the back of the throat, usually written ch in Hebrew names and never pronounced like the ch in "church" — so Chaim is KHY-eem, Chana is KHA-na, Rachel is really Ra-KHEL, and families who tired of explaining it write Haim, Hana and Hayyim instead. The letter tzadi is a ts cluster, so Tzipporah begins the way "cats" ends, and the older English spelling Zipporah quietly drops it. Add the vowel differences between Ashkenazi and Israeli pronunciation and you get whole families of variants: Yosef and Yoseph and Joseph, Devorah and Dvora and Deborah, Tova and Tovah, Sara and Sarah, Yaakov and Jacob. Pick the spelling you want the child to write for sixty years, say it aloud with the surname, and do not worry that another family spells it differently — they are both correct. One last note on stress: Israeli Hebrew usually stresses the final syllable, so Yael is yah-EL and Talia is tal-YA, while the Ashkenazi habit pulls it back to YAH-el and TAH-lee-a. Both are heard in English-speaking countries.

Top picks, annotated

For girls

For boys

Pairing rule for Hebrew middles: watch the Y. A great many of these names open on a consonantal Y — Yael, Yosef, Yonatan, Yehuda, Yardena, Yaffa — and that sound sticks to a first name ending in -ee or -a. Sadie Yael and Mia Yardena both slur; Grace Yael and Thomas Yosef do not. The second trap is the throat-clearing ch, which needs a vowel in front of it to be audible at all: Ella Chana disappears, Noah Menachem rings. And if you are honoring a relative whose name is long, remember the middle slot is the one place a five-syllable name costs nothing — Charlotte Elisheva is signed far more often than it is spoken.

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Neighbouring origins: Arabic, Greek, Persian, Russian, or all 24 origin lists. These names supply most of the biblical list; if you are naming for a specific relative, start with honoring family and two middle names.