Names that mean hope, with the word behind each one

The English virtue names

Hope is the plainest option and the oldest in English use: it is one of the Puritan virtue names of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, given alongside Faith, Charity, Grace, Mercy and Patience. Faith, Hope and Charity come from the trio at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, which is why they were adopted together and why they are still sometimes given to sisters. Nadia, Esperanza and the rest below all do the same job in another language.

The Slavic family

Russian nadezhda means hope, and it is a name in its own right. Nadia and Nadya began as its diminutives and travelled outwards from there; Nadine is the French form of Nadia. There is a genuine complication: Arabic has a separate name, Nadia, from a root meaning moist or tender, and another, Nadiya, connected to calling out. The spellings have converged in English, so a family choosing Nadia may reasonably mean either. That is worth knowing rather than worrying about.

The Romance family

Arabic: amal, and the trap next to it

Arabic amal means hope or aspiration, and Amal is a common name across the Arab world. It is used for women in most countries and for men in some, which is not a contradiction so much as regional practice. The trap is that Arabic also has ʿamal, meaning work or deed, spelled with a different first letter that English transliteration flattens. The two are unrelated. The Quranic Arabic Corpus keeps them apart clearly, and it is the place to check if you want to be certain which word you are naming a child after.

Sanskrit and Indian languages: asha

Sanskrit asha means hope, wish or expectation, and Asha is a current name across India. Here too there is a homonym. Asha is also used in East Africa and among Muslim communities as a form of Aisha, the Arabic name meaning "alive, living", which was given to 436 girls in England and Wales in 2025. Same spelling in English, two entirely separate names. Aashini and Ashita are related Sanskrit forms; Umeed, from Persian ummid, is the hope word used in Urdu and Hindi.

Hebrew: tikva

Hebrew tikvah means hope, and it is the word in the title of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah. As a given name it is used mainly in Israel. The related name Tikva Bracha pairs it with the blessing word. There is no widely used male counterpart.

Turkish, Japanese and further afield

Turkish is unusually easy to verify here. The Turkish Language Association publishes the official dictionary online, and because Turkish spelling is one letter to one sound, the word and the name are identical on the page: umut is hope in the dictionary and Umut on a birth certificate.

Hope names for boys

This meaning skews heavily female in English, which is a fact about English rather than about the idea. Several languages give it to boys without comment.

Tesfaye and Themba are worth a second look if you want a name that states the meaning outright in a living language and is not a translation of an English idea. Both are ordinary names in their own countries rather than revivals, and both are transparent to anyone who speaks the language.

The ones that do not survive checking

Three names appear on hope lists without support. Ilaria is Latin hilaris, "cheerful" — a different feeling. Elpida is genuinely Greek for hope, from elpis, and belongs here, but the related Elpis is a mythological figure rather than a current name. And Nadira, Nadia and Nadhira are three separate Arabic names that lists routinely merge into one entry with one meaning; they are not the same word.

Hope, faith and the sisters they come with

If Hope is on your list, it is worth knowing what it usually arrives with. The Puritan virtue names were given as a set, and Faith, Hope, Grace, Mercy, Prudence, Patience, Charity and Verity all belong to the same seventeenth-century habit of naming a child after a quality rather than a person. Several have come back strongly — Grace was 27th in England and Wales in 2025 with 1,309 babies, and the most popular girls' name in Northern Ireland — while others have not moved at all. Hope sits between the two.

How these behave in the official data

None of these names is common in England and Wales, and that is part of their appeal. The ONS publishes the full list down to three babies a year, so you can check any of them directly rather than relying on a site's popularity estimate. The names that do appear in numbers — Nadia, Amal, Asha — are almost always carried by families with a direct connection to the language, which is worth thinking about if you are choosing one from outside.