Names that mean star, and the two that famously do not

The star words, language by language

Star is one of the better-behaved meanings, because most of the names in this group are simply the ordinary word in a living language. That makes them easy to check and hard to get wrong — which is what makes the two exceptions at the end of this page so striking.

Tara is worth a second look because it is two names at once. The Sanskrit word is genuine and ancient. There is also an Irish Tara, from Teamhair, the hill in County Meath that was the seat of the high kings, and that one has nothing to do with stars. Both are in ordinary use in Britain, which means the name arrives with two honest meanings rather than one.

The two that lists get wrong

Astrid is not a star name

Astrid looks as though it should contain Latin astrum, and it does not. It is the modern form of Old Norse Ástríðr, from ass, meaning a god, and friðr, meaning beautiful or beloved. Every element is Norse; none of them is a star. The name was given to 196 girls in England and Wales in 2025, so a lot of families are carrying a meaning that is real and lovely but is not the one they were sold. The same applies to Astrud and to the Swedish Estrid.

Esther is disputed, not settled

Esther is regularly glossed as "star", from Persian setareh. That derivation is one of two serious proposals; the other connects the name to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, which would make it a divine name rather than an object. The Hebrew Bible gives Esther a second, Hebrew name, Hadassah, meaning myrtle, which some read as evidence that Esther is the foreign name of the pair. The honest position is that the etymology is unresolved, and any source that gives you "star" flatly is overstating the evidence.

Constellations and single stars

A separate group names a specific star rather than the category, and several of these have quiet Arabic origins that English has forgotten. Vega comes from Arabic al-waqi, the falling or swooping eagle. Altair is al-tair, the flyer. Rigel is rijl, a foot. Sirius is Greek, from a word meaning scorching. Lyra and Cassiopeia are constellations. Nova is Latin for "new" and became an astronomical term for a star that suddenly brightens, so it is a star word only at second hand — it was 46th in the United States in 2025 with 4,657 babies.

Boys' names in this group

Najm and Najmuddin are used for men across the Arab world, Sitara is female but Setar-related male forms exist in Persian, and Tarak, from the same Sanskrit root as Tara, is a men's name in India. Stellan is Scandinavian and its derivation is uncertain rather than stellar, despite the spelling. In English the clearest male options are the constellation and single-star names — Orion, Altair, Rigel — which are place-names in the sky rather than words meaning star.

Star names in scripture and myth

Two traditions supply names that are about a particular star rather than stars in general. In the Christian nativity the star over Bethlehem gives Stella Maris its resonance and lies behind the occasional use of Star and Starla as English names. In Islam, Surah an-Najm opens with an oath by the star, and Thurayya, the Pleiades, appears in classical Arabic poetry often enough that it is still recognised as a poetic name rather than an ordinary one.

Greek myth turns people into stars rather than the reverse: Callisto, Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Orion are all constellations named after figures, so their names mean what the figures' names meant. Callisto is "most beautiful". Andromeda is a compound about ruling over men. None of them means star, and a list that files them under this meaning has confused the object with the label stuck on it.

Where these sit in the 2025 data

Only two of these names are common in Britain. Stella and Estelle both appear in the ONS full list for England and Wales, and Tara at 90 girls sits well down it. Everything else here is rare enough that the ONS threshold matters: the office publishes every name given to three or more babies in the year and suppresses anything below, so a name that does not appear was given to fewer than three children rather than to none. In the United States the picture is different again, because Estrella and Citlali travel with Spanish-speaking and Mexican-American families and the SSA list reflects that.

Checking any of these

The test that catches most errors on this meaning is to ask whether the word is still live. Najm, sitara, yildiz, seren and hoku are all words a speaker uses today, which is why their meanings are safe. Astrid and Esther are names whose supposed meanings come from reconstruction rather than current usage, and reconstruction is where the arguments are. The ONS full-list dataset will tell you how many children in England and Wales received each of them in 2025; it will not tell you what they mean, and no popularity list should be asked to.