Names Meaning Sun in Ten Languages, With the Sources

The sun words, language by language

Sun names are unusually easy to verify, because most of them are simply the word for sun in some language used as a name. That makes the category one where the false entries stand out clearly. Counts are from the Office for National Statistics 2025 lists for England and Wales.

The three that sun lists get wrong

Cyrus

Cyrus appears on every list of Persian sun names. Behind the Name gives the Old Persian Kuruš as possibly meaning "young" or "humiliator of the enemy", notes that it could be of Elamite origin, and records a later association with the Greek word kyrios meaning "lord". None of that is the sun. Ninety-one boys were given Cyrus in England and Wales in 2025.

Apollo

Apollo became associated with the sun in later classical tradition, but the name is of unknown meaning. Behind the Name records competing theories: an Indo-European root meaning "strength", an Anatolian god whose name may mean "father lion" or "father light", and a Greek folk association with a verb meaning "to destroy". Thirty-nine boys received it in 2025.

Mithra

Mithra is regularly presented as a Persian sun god name. The Avestan word mithra means "oath, covenant, agreement", from an Indo-Iranian root meaning "that which binds". Mithra was a god of light and friendship. The name means covenant, and the sun arrives through the cult rather than the word.

Light, dawn and ray names, which are close but different

Several names describe light rather than the sun. Uri means "my light" in Hebrew, from ʾur "light", and Uriel means "God is my light". Nuri means "my light" in Arabic. Roshan means "light, bright" in Persian. Kiran is often given as "sunbeam" in Sanskrit; Behind the Name records the word as able to mean "dust" or "thread" or "sunbeam", so it is one reading of three.

Dawn names are a third group. Aurora means "dawn" in Latin and was the Roman goddess of the morning; at 1,030 girls it is much the most used name anywhere on this page. Eos means "dawn" in Greek. Zora means "dawn, aurora" in the South Slavic languages, Czech and Slovak, and went to 20 girls. All three are securely attested, and none of them means sun.

Aditya, and why the answer is layered

Aditya is frequently listed as Sanskrit for sun, and the position is more interesting than that. Behind the Name gives the meaning as "belonging to Aditi", the name of the Hindu gods who are the children of the goddess Aditi, and notes that it is also another name for the sun god Surya. So Aditya is a name of the sun god without meaning "sun". Elio sits in a similar position: it is the Italian and Spanish form of Aelius, a Roman family name of unknown meaning traditionally connected with the Greek word for sun, and also the Italian form of Helios itself.

Where sun names sit in the 2025 data

This is a category almost nobody in England and Wales uses. Of the ten names in the table above, four were given to fewer than three babies and are therefore withheld from the published list, and the largest is Sol at 49 boys. The two most-used names commonly filed under sun — Cyrus at 91 boys and Apollo at 39 — are the two whose meanings do not hold up. Meanwhile Aurora, which means dawn and not sun, was given to 1,030 girls and outnumbers every attested sun name in the country put together.

That gap tells you something useful. If the meaning is the point, the securely sourced options are genuinely rare in Britain and will need explaining. If you want a name that reads as bright and warm without needing a footnote, the dawn names do that work and their etymologies are simpler.

Sunna, Sunniva and the Germanic sun words

Old English had sunne for the sun, and it produced one name that survived: Sunngifu, "sun gift", which travelled north and became the Norwegian Sunniva. Behind the Name records the legend attached to it, of an Irish princess who settled on a Norwegian island. The Icelandic Sunna is a short form of Sunneva or of Susanna, so it is a sun name only by one of its two routes. This is the one part of the category where a Germanic language contributes, and it is worth knowing that English itself produced almost nothing else from the word.

How to check a sun name

The test that catches almost every error here is to ask whether the name is the word for sun or the name of a sun god. Apollo, Aditya, Mithra and Elio are all associated with sun deities and none of them means sun. Helios, Surya and Shams are both the word and the god, which is why they are secure. And be careful with Japanese: Hinata's sense depends on which kanji are used, and no roman spelling can settle it. For Greek and Latin the Perseus lexicon gives the entries directly.