Names that mean light, and the ones that only look like it

Latin: lux

Latin lux, light, is the root of the largest group of these names in Europe. It is also the root that trips people up, because two of the names most often assigned to it do not belong.

Luke and Lucas are not light names. They come from Lucania, a region of southern Italy, and the resemblance to lux is a coincidence of spelling. Lucas was 10th in the United States in 2025 with 10,219 babies and 32nd in England and Wales with 1,381, so this is a widely held misunderstanding.

Arabic: the root n-w-r

The Arabic root n-w-r produces nur, light, and a family of names around it. The Quran's twenty-fourth chapter is Surah an-Nur, and the Quranic Arabic Corpus indexes every occurrence, so these meanings are as well attested as any in this article.

Hebrew: or

Hebrew or is light, and it compounds freely. Uri is "my light"; Uriel is "God is my light"; Liora is "I have light" or "my light", and was given to 72 girls in England and Wales in 2025. Ori is the same element used plainly, and Meir and Meira mean "giving light". Zohar, a separate word, means "brightness" and is also the title of the central work of Kabbalah.

Sanskrit, Persian and Slavic

Greek, and one long-running dispute

Phoebe is Greek for "bright, radiant", and the meaning is not in question: it was 14th in England and Wales in 2025 with 1,542 babies. Helen is the difficulty. It has been linked to helene, a torch, since antiquity, but the derivation is genuinely uncertain and modern reference works decline to settle it. Elena, Eleanor, Ellen and Nell all descend from it and all inherit the same uncertainty, so if a secure meaning matters to you, this is the family to avoid. Eleanor was 12th in the United States in 2025 with 7,649 babies and its meaning is still open.

Names that come from festivals of light

Three traditions turn light into a festival, and each has left names behind. Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights, and the small clay lamp lit for it is the diya; the name Diya comes straight from the object, and Deepak, Deepika and Deep all come from dipa, the same word in Sanskrit. Roshni, from Persian, means brightness and is used in the same communities.

Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of lights, and the Hebrew names around it are the plain ones — Or, light; Ori, my light; Liora and Meira. None of them is specific to the festival, but they belong to the same vocabulary.

Saint Lucy's day, 13 December, is kept in Sweden and Norway as Lucia, with a procession of candles, and this is why Lucia is a Scandinavian name as much as an Italian one. The saint was Sicilian, martyred in the fourth century, and her name is the Latin light word; the Nordic observance is a much later borrowing. Lucia was given to 284 girls in England and Wales in 2025, and Lucy to 6,176 babies in the United States, so both forms are current in English-speaking countries without any of the festival attached.

Names we would not put on this list

Aurora means "dawn", not light, and it has the Roman goddess behind it — a neighbouring meaning, not this one. Elior is a real Hebrew compound but is much rarer than lists imply. And Lucinda was invented by Cervantes on the model of Lucia; the light sense is borrowed rather than inherited, which is worth knowing but does not disqualify it.

Boys' names in this group

The light meaning is not confined to girls' names, though English-language lists often present it that way. Lucian and Luciano carry the Latin root; Uri, Uriel and Meir carry the Hebrew one; Munir and Anwar carry the Arabic; Prakash, Deepak and Kiran carry the Sanskrit, with Kiran used for both sexes in India. Zohar is used for men and women in Israel. None of these is common in England and Wales, and the ONS full list is the place to see exactly how uncommon.

Using the data

The ONS full-list datasets for England and Wales publish every name given to three or more babies, so you can look up any name here and see exactly how many children shared it in 2025. That matters more for this meaning than most, because the light names run from Lucy in the American top 25 down to names given to a handful of children in a single year.