Love

This is the largest concept in the Atlas, drawn from more traditions than any other, and the first thing to say is that the languages do not agree on what is being named.

Greek famously distinguishes several kinds — éros, philía, agápē, storgē — and it is agápē, the selfless and unconditional sort, that produced the Christian name tradition. Latin amor and the family of names built on amāre make no such distinction.

Sanskrit contributes two of the most productive elements in Indian naming: priya, beloved or dear, and prema, love in a broad sense including devotional love for a deity. Both compound freely. The devotional sense matters — a great many Sanskrit love-names are religious rather than romantic in origin, and reading them as romantic is a common misunderstanding.

Arabic ḥabīb and ḥubb come from a root with a concrete original sense connected to seeds or grain, from which affection developed. Hebrew names in this area draw on ahavah and on dod, the beloved of the Song of Songs. The Slavic element ljub- is exceptionally productive across Russian, Polish, Serbian and Czech.

Yoruba, Igbo and Akan naming approaches love from a direction European traditions largely do not: many of the names on this page from West Africa are statements about the circumstances of a birth, or about the child's relationship to a family that wanted her, rather than declarations of feeling in the abstract.