What Does Your Name Mean?

Once a year when we have a Sunday School lesson that includes names of people or places and what they mean I like to look up the names of everyone in my class to see what their names mean and share that with them. They seem to like that and it’s fun to do. Last Sunday I had a lesson like this. It was about Jacob (“heal grabber”) having his named changed to Israel (“wrestles with God”) and his special place, Bethel (“House of God”) that he went back to with his family to build an altar and worship God.

Here is the list of the boys names I have in my class:

two Jacobs (heal grabber/trickster; Jewish origin)

Ian (God is gracious; Jewish origin)

Nicholas (Victorious People; Greek origin)

Kyle (narrow piece of land; Scottish origin) He wasn’t too pleased with his but he said it also means generous.

Timmy (To honor God; Greek origin)

Jesse (God’s gift; Jewish origin)

Steven (crown; Greek origin)

two Matthews (gift of God; Jewish origin)

Ryan (Little King; Irish origin)

Unfortunately, I forgot to look up Ryan’s name and felt bad that we didn’t know his. I looked it up as soon as I got home on www.parents.com/baby-names/search. I sent his dad a message on Facebook asking him to let Ryan know what his name meant.

At this site you can put in a name and get the meaning and origin or you can even put in a meaning and it gives you names. If you had the opportunity to choose a name for someone, what meaning would you like them to have? This is harder to do. I tried animal lover, kind to animals, competitor, athletic and no names popped up for any of these.

My name, "Karen", means pure and is from Greek origin. I looked up "Gerard" and his means brave spearman and is from English origin. I think that is a more interesting meaning than mine. Being the animal lover that I am, I also checked our pets names: “Manny” means God with us and is a variation on Emmanuel, “Abby” means a father’s joy, which she certainly is (both are Jewish origin) and “Spunky” wasn’t listed but it means spirited and courageous according to the dictionary which indeed she is! I knew what that name meant when I gave it to her because of her personality. If I had been a boy, I would have been named Keith which means wood.

You may want to check into what a name means before giving it to a child in case they get a teacher like me one day that does this.

This was one of the prompts from Mama Kat's Writer's Workshop (that I did a little late) but that's okay.

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