Names Meaning Lion in Six Languages, With Sources

The lion words, language by language

Lion is one of the few meaning categories where the popular glosses are mostly right and the names are in genuine use. Latin leo and Greek leon produced a family of names that spread across Europe, and separate lines run through Arabic, Turkic and Hebrew. Counts are from the Office for National Statistics 2025 lists for England and Wales, released on 9 July 2026.

What the counts show

Leo was the third most popular boys' name in England and Wales in 2025 with 3,278 babies, behind Muhammad and Noah. Add Leon at 526, Leonardo at 389, Lionel at 24 and Leona at 52 and the Latin and Greek line alone accounts for well over four thousand babies. No other meaning category on this site has a name that high in the rankings. If you want a lion name that will read as entirely ordinary in Britain, Leo is not merely available — it is one of the most common names in the country.

The other lines are much smaller but all present: Aslan at 62 boys, Asad at 32, and on the girls' side Ariella at 305 against Ariel at 37, which is a striking split between a name and its explicitly feminine form.

The one that is not a lion name

Llewelyn

Llewelyn looks like a Welsh lion name and is regularly listed as one. Behind the Name records it as a variant of Llywelyn influenced by the Welsh word llew, "lion" — and gives Llywelyn itself as probably a Welsh form of an unattested old Celtic name Lugubelinos, combining the names of the gods Lugus and Belenus, or a compound of Lugus with a Celtic root meaning "strong". It also offers an alternative derivation from Welsh llyw, "leader". So the lion is in the spelling of one variant, arriving later than the name, and the underlying etymology is disputed. That is a much more interesting fact than "lion-like", and it is the accurate one.

Lion names that carry a story

Aslan is the clearest case of a name whose modern use is literary. Behind the Name records it as a byname or title borne by several medieval Turkic rulers, including the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, whose byname means "brave lion" and who drove the Byzantines from Anatolia in the eleventh century. C. S. Lewis then used it for the lion in the Chronicles of Narnia from 1950. Both the etymology and the story are solid, and they point in the same direction, which is unusual.

Ariel carries a different set. In the Old Testament it is another name for Jerusalem; Shakespeare used it for a spirit in The Tempest, Alexander Pope for a sylph in The Rape of the Lock, and a moon of Uranus is named in Pope's honour. Behind the Name notes it became more common for girls in the English-speaking world in the 1980s. Underneath all of that the meaning stays fixed: lion of God.

The Germanic compounds that carry the lion

One more line reaches English through Old German. Leonard means "brave lion", from the Old German elements lewo "lion", itself of Latin origin, and hart "hard, firm, brave, hardy". It was borne by a sixth-century Frankish saint, and it is the source of the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese Leonardo, which went to 389 boys in England and Wales in 2025. This is the same pattern seen in wolf names: a Germanic compound that pairs an animal with a quality, in which the animal word has been borrowed from Latin rather than inherited.

It also explains why Leonardo and Leo feel like the same name and are not quite. Leo is the Latin word used directly; Leonardo comes through a Germanic compound that had already borrowed it. Both are lion names, and only one of them is only a lion name.

Simha and the Sanskrit line

Sanskrit simha, "lion", is the element behind Singh, which functions as a surname and a name across South Asia, and it appears in place names such as Singapore. It is worth including in any honest account of lion words even though it produces few first names used in Britain, because a list that stops at Europe and the Middle East is describing the compiler's reading rather than the world's languages.

How to check a lion name

This category needs less checking than most, because the main elements are short, well attested and easy to spot: Latin leo, Greek leon, Arabic asad, Turkic arslan, Hebrew ʾari and Sanskrit simha. If a name contains one of those, the lion is probably real. The trap is the reverse case — a name that acquired a lion-looking spelling later, as Llewelyn did. For the Greek and Latin, the Perseus lexicon gives the entry for leon directly, and Behind the Name cites its sources for the individual names.