How an Arabic name is actually built
Most of the confusion around Arabic names comes from treating them like a first name plus a surname. Classically they are a chain of up to five parts, and only the first is a given name:
- Ism — the given name. Muhammad, Fatima. This is what the generator above picks.
- Nasab — the lineage, introduced by bin/ibn (son of) or bint (daughter of), and extendable back through grandfathers.
- Kunya — Abu (father of) or Umm (mother of) plus the eldest child's name. It is a form of respect, and in most societies it arrives with the first child — though not always: the Prophet (peace be upon him) addressed a small boy who had no children at all as Abu Umayr (Sahih al-Bukhari 6129).
- Laqab — an epithet earned later: al-Rashid, al-Siddiq.
- Nisba — an adjective of belonging: a place, a tribe, a trade. al-Baghdadi, al-Shafi‘i.
يَا أَبَا عُمَيْرٍ مَا فَعَلَ النُّغَيْرُ
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: O Abu Umayr, what did the little bird do?
— Narrated by Anas ibn Malik, from the Prophet (peace be upon him) speaking to Anas’s young brother; Sahih al-Bukhari 6129
Put together: Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Idris al-Shafi‘i — kunya, ism, nasab, nisba. One man, and not a single part of it is a surname in the modern sense.
A newborn needs only the ism. The nasab follows from the father's name automatically, and the kunya comes decades later. That is why the generator asks for the father's name and nothing else.
The rules that actually constrain the choice
Naming is broad: the default is that any name with a sound meaning is allowed. Four points narrow it.
1. Two names are singled out
إِنَّ أَحَبَّ أَسْمَائِكُمْ إِلَى اللَّهِ عَبْدُ اللَّهِ وَعَبْدُ الرَّحْمَنِ
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: The most beloved of your names to Allah are Abdullah and Abd al-Rahman.
— Narrated by Ibn Umar, from the Prophet (peace be upon him); Sahih Muslim 2132
This is a recommendation, not a restriction on everything else. Naming after a prophet is encouraged too, but it rests on separate evidence, not on this hadith: the Prophet (peace be upon him) named his own newborn son after Ibrahim (Sahih Muslim 2315).
وُلِدَ لِيَ اللَّيْلَةَ غُلاَمٌ فَسَمَّيْتُهُ بِاسْمِ أَبِي إِبْرَاهِيمَ
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: A child was born to me tonight, and I named him after my father Ibrahim.
— Narrated by Anas ibn Malik, from the Prophet (peace be upon him); Sahih Muslim 2315
“My father Ibrahim” is the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham, peace be upon him). The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) descended from Ibrahim through his son Ismail, and Arabic uses ab (father) for a forefather as well. The speaker is the Prophet himself and the newborn was his own son — the biographies record his mother as Maria al-Qibtiyya — who was given the forefather’s name.
2. Allah's exclusive names are not given to a person on their own
Names that belong only to Allah are used in the Abd al- (servant of) form. The name without the servitude is not given:
The distinction is the definite article and the exclusivity. Karim, Rashid, Hakim and Malik describe people too, so they are given as names freely; al-Karim, al-Rahman and al-Khaliq as titles are not. And the servitude runs one way only — Abd compounded with anything other than Allah (Abd al-Nabi, Abd al-Husayn, Abd al-Masih) is rejected by the overwhelming majority of scholars, because servitude is owed to Allah alone.
On the same principle, the Prophet (peace be upon him) warned against taking the name Malik al-Amlak — king of kings. Two narrations, worded a little differently:
أَخْنَى الأَسْمَاءِ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ رَجُلٌ تَسَمَّى مَلِكَ الأَمْلاَكِ
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: The most awful name in Allah’s sight on the Day of Resurrection will be a man calling himself Malik al-Amlak (king of kings).
— Narrated by Abu Huraira, from the Prophet (peace be upon him); Sahih al-Bukhari 6205
إِنَّ أَخْنَعَ اسْمٍ عِنْدَ اللَّهِ رَجُلٌ تَسَمَّى مَلِكَ الأَمْلاَكِ
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: The vilest name in Allah’s sight is a man who calls himself Malik al-Amlak (king of kings).
— Narrated by Abu Huraira, from the Prophet (peace be upon him); Sahih Muslim 2143
Muslim's own chapter heading covers both forms of it, Malik al-Amlak and Malik al-Muluk.
3. Names that praise their bearer were changed
Zaynab bint Abi Salama was named Barra — "the pious one". The Prophet (peace be upon him) renamed her, and the reason is his own wording: do not claim purity for yourselves, Allah knows best who among you is truly pious (Sahih Muslim 2142b). A woman named ‘Asiya — عاصية, "disobedient" — he renamed Jamila (Sahih Muslim 2139). That is not the Asiya in the table below: آسية, the wife of Pharaoh, is a different word that happens to reach English with the same spelling.
لاَ تُزَكُّوا أَنْفُسَكُمُ اللَّهُ أَعْلَمُ بِأَهْلِ الْبِرِّ مِنْكُمْ
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Do not claim purity for yourselves; Allah knows best who among you are the people of righteousness.
— Narrated by Zaynab bint Abi Salama, from the Prophet (peace be upon him); Sahih Muslim 2142b
أَنَّ رَسُولَ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم غَيَّرَ اسْمَ عَاصِيَةَ وَقَالَ: أَنْتِ جَمِيلَةُ
The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) changed the name of ‘Asiya (“Disobedient”) and said: You are Jamila.
— Ibn Umar, Sahih Muslim 2139
Two tests can be put to any name, though they are not equally firm.
The meaning must not be an ugly one — this one is not disputed; the Prophet (peace be upon him) changed "disobedient" to "beautiful".
A name should not treat its bearer's piety as a settled fact — this is what the Barra case turns on, and the reason is stated in the hadith itself: do not claim your own purity, for Allah knows best who among you is God-fearing.
Where exactly the second line falls is disputed, so this page does not draw it for you. The list below contains names of precisely that kind — Taqi (God-fearing), Zaki (pure), Siddiq (truthful) — borne in every generation, by Companions and by scholars, and at the same time the closest to that line. If one of them is the name you want, take it to a scholar in your own community.
4. The language of the name is not the issue
There is no requirement that a Muslim name be Arabic. Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Malay, Bosnian, Hausa and Chinese Muslim names are all simply names, judged by their meaning. The same test applies to Arabic ones — plenty of Arabic names carry meanings nobody would want once they look them up.
For converts, this cuts both ways: there is no obligation to change your name on accepting Islam. Most of the Companions kept the names they were born with. A change is called for only when the meaning conflicts — servitude to something other than Allah, or the name of a deity.
When the name is given
The reported practice is the seventh day, together with the aqiqah and the shaving of the head. Naming on the day of birth is also reported — the Prophet (peace be upon him) named his son Ibrahim the night he was born (Sahih Muslim 2315, quoted above) — so the seventh day is a strong recommendation rather than a deadline.
كُلُّ غُلاَمٍ رَهِينَةٌ بِعَقِيقَتِهِ تُذْبَحُ عَنْهُ يَوْمَ سَابِعِهِ وَيُحْلَقُ وَيُسَمَّى
The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Every boy is in pledge for his aqiqah: a sacrifice is made for him on the seventh day, his head is shaved, and he is named.
— Narrated by Samura ibn Jundub, from the Prophet (peace be upon him); Sunan Abi Dawud 2838. Jami‘ at-Tirmidhi 1522 has the same report
One practical note on spelling
The transliterations here are deliberately plain: Abd al-Rahman, not ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Academic transliteration is more precise, and it does not survive the trip through a passport office: the machine-readable zone of a passport carries unaccented A–Z and nothing else, so the marks get dropped or substituted somewhere along the way, not always the same way twice. Pick the plain spelling, then use the same spelling on every document from the first one onward — Mohammed on one document and Muhammad on another is the kind of mismatch that has to be untangled afterwards, one office at a time.
Browse all 216 names
Every Arabic name is written with its short-vowel marks (tashkil), so you can read it straight off the page: fatha ـَ is a short "a", damma ـُ a short "u", kasra ـِ a short "i", sukun ـْ means no vowel follows, and shadda ـّ doubles the consonant. Long vowels are the letters alif, waw and ya themselves and carry no mark. Names are shown as you would say them on their own, without the grammatical ending a full sentence would add. Copying a name copies the plain spelling without the marks, since the marks do not survive every system.
Search by transliteration, by Arabic script (with or without the marks), by meaning, or by theme. This is the whole list the generator draws from — including all 24 of the prophets named in the Qur’an that are given as names.