Palestinian Names and Their Meanings: Family Names and Their Roots in the Land
Palestinian names (الأسماء الفلسطينية) work like a short family history. A full name strings together a person's own name, their father's and their grandfather's, and the family name at the end very often records a place, a trade or an ancestor's nickname: Nabulsi means a family from Nablus, Haddad means blacksmith, and Zaytoon means olives. Read closely, a Palestinian surname is a small map of where a family lived and how it made its living, which is the same kind of memory FALASTIN carries into its Palestinian Clothing collection.
TL;DR
Palestinian names traditionally run personal name, father's name, grandfather's name, then a family name, and women do not traditionally take their husband's name at marriage. A survey of 8,343 family names in the 2001 West Bank telephone directory found that about 62% of those names describe a way of life (physical traits, farming, temperament, places and trades), while the other 38% are personal or religious names such as Ali or Abdul-Rahman. Place names end in -i or -awi (Nabulsi, Ramlawi, Majdalawi), trade names name the work (Haddad, Najjar, Khayyat), and parents are called by the kunya, Abu or Umm plus their eldest son's name. In the diaspora, a family name is often the one piece of the hometown that travels everywhere.
How Are Palestinian Names Structured?
A Palestinian name traditionally follows the Arabic pattern of personal name, then father's personal name, then grandfather's personal name, so a boy might be Yousef Hussam Khalil and his sister Zeena Hussam Khalil. The Cultural Atlas guide to Palestinian naming notes that the lineage passes through the father's side, that a fourth name for a great-grandfather is sometimes added, and that Palestinian women do not traditionally adopt their husband's name when they marry.
Several older layers of Arabic naming sit inside that chain. Each one has its own job:
- Ism (اسم): the given name, such as Muhammad, which means praiseworthy, or Ali, which means exalted.
- Nasab (نسب): the lineage, written with ibn (son of) or bint (daughter of), as in Maryam bint Yousef.
- Laqab (لقب): a nickname or descriptive title, which over generations often hardened into a family name.
- Nisba (نسبة): a name of belonging, built from a town, a tribe or a trade, and the most common source of Palestinian surnames.
- Kunya (كنية): the honorific "father of" or "mother of" a child, used in daily life with respect and warmth.
Palestinian Family Names That Come From Towns
Palestinian family names that come from towns are built by adding -i, -awi or -ani to the place, so the family from Nablus becomes Nabulsi and the family from Hebron, al-Khalil in Arabic, becomes Khalili. The linguist Ahmad Atawneh of Hebron University explains in his study Family Names in Palestine, published in the journal Names in 2005, that these names usually appear when someone moves from his original town to a new place, where he is easily identified by the town he came from.
That is the quiet power of a place-name surname. It is a record of a move, kept for generations after the move itself is forgotten. Atawneh counted 551 geographical family names in his sample, and the largest share, 260 of them, named the place a family came from rather than the place it settled.
| Family name | Means | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| Nabulsi | from Nablus | Nablus, its soap and its old city |
| Khalili | from al-Khalil (Hebron) | A southern hill city of glass and pottery |
| Qudsi | from al-Quds (Jerusalem) | The city's Arabic name, al-Quds |
| Gazzawi | from Gaza | The coastal city of the south |
| Akkawi, Hefawi | from Akka (Acre), from Haifa | The northern port cities |
| Ramlawi, Liddawi | from Ramla, from Lydda | Lydda, al-Lidd, and its history |
| Majdalawi | from al-Majdal | The Majdalawi weaving tradition |
| Anabtawi, Salfiti, Qalqili | from Anabta, Salfit, Qalqilya | Towns of the northern West Bank |
Atawneh also records that families often took the name of their village, and that in rarer cases a village took the name of its dominant family. Majdalawi is a good example of how far one of these names can reach: the same word names a family from al-Majdal and the striped cloth that the town's weavers became known for.
Palestinian Family Names From Trades and Crafts
Palestinian family names from trades preserve the working life of the towns and villages: Haddad is the blacksmith, Najjar the carpenter, Khayyat the tailor and Khabbaz the baker. A 1992 study by Hanna Tushyeh of Bethlehem University and Rami Hamdallah of An-Najah National University, Palestinian Surnames Derived from Nicknames, collected 413 surnames from cities, towns, villages and refugee camps across the West Bank and sorted them into twelve categories, from animals and plants to occupations and places.
The occupation names describe a mostly rural society, and some of the trades they record no longer exist. Tushyeh and Hamdallah list Saqqa, the man who sold water, and Qanawati, the canal digger, a name they note is held by many Christian families in Bethlehem, where a family tradition says their ancestor dug the channels that carried water from Solomon's Pools south of Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Other surnames keep the sound of celebration: Awwad, the lute player, Tabbal, the drummer, and Zammar, the player of the reed pipe. Khoury, meaning priest, the authors call a Christian name above all others.
Atawneh's larger sample adds the trades that dressed and fed a town: Qattan for the cotton man, Qazzaz for the silk man, Tahhan for the miller, Farran for the man who ran the oven and Attar for the spice seller. Both studies found that these surnames date mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which means many Palestinian families still answer, every day, to the job an ancestor did two or three hundred years ago.
Family Names From the Land: Olives, Figs and Wheat
Family names taken from the land are among the most common in Palestine. In Atawneh's tables, names tied to farming, crops and animals make up 28.70% of the family names that describe a way of life, second only to names describing physical features at 30.34%.
| Category in Atawneh's 2005 study | Share of descriptive family names | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Physical features | 30.34% | Qasir (short), Abu Shagra (fair-haired) |
| Agriculture and animals | 28.70% | Zaytoon (olives), Teen (figs), Batteekh (watermelon) |
| Temperament | 12.34% | Farhan (happy), Ghadban (angry) |
| Geographical area | 10.70% | Nabulsi, Ramlawi, Majdalawi |
| Trade and industry | 10.32% | Najjar, Qattan, Tahhan |
| Financial condition | 4.00% | Dahab (gold), Faqir (poor) |
| Time and heavenly bodies | 3.60% | Abu Jum'a (Friday), Hilal (crescent moon) |
Atawneh lists olives, grapes, figs, pomegranates, lentils, chickpeas and za'atar among the plants that became family names, along with Qamhawi, "of wheat". The study reads them as a portrait of the eighteenth and nineteenth century village economy, when a family could be named for what grew best on its land. Anyone who has walked an olive grove in the autumn will understand why a family would be proud to be called Zaytoon.
What Do Abu and Umm Mean in a Palestinian Name?
Abu means "father of" and Umm means "mother of", and together they form the kunya (كنية), the respectful name parents are called by once their eldest son is born. The father of Ahmad becomes Abu Ahmad and the mother becomes Umm Ahmad, according to the Cultural Atlas, and the kunya matters enough that even a childless person may be given one, making them symbolically the parent of a quality.
The custom shapes how names are chosen too. Because Arab men have traditionally named their first son after their own father, a man is often known by his kunya before his son even exists. Abu also appears inside many family names, where Tushyeh and Hamdallah note it can mean "wielder of" rather than father: Abu Minshar is the man with the saw.
Palestinian Given Names: Faith, Family and Meaning
Palestinian given names draw on Islam, on Christian scripture and on older Arabic words with clear meanings. A 1989 study by Hanna Tushyeh, Edwin Lawson and George Rishmawi, Palestinian First Names: An Introduction, analysed the first names of 768 Palestinian schoolchildren from the West Bank and inside the Green Line and found 341 different names, which it classified by meaning and by whether they read as Christian, Muslim or neutral.
Muslim families often choose compound names built on Abd, servant, joined to one of God's names, such as Abdul-Rahman or Abdul-Raheem. Atawneh found that about a third of West Bank family names are religious names shaped like first names, such as Ali, Hasan or Abdul-Rahman, passed down from an ancestor. Among Palestinian Christians, Biblical names such as Maryam are popular. Many names are shared by both communities, which is one reason the 1989 study needed a "neutral" column at all.
Why Do Palestinian Names Carry Place in the Diaspora?
Palestinian names carry place in the diaspora because a family name is the one record of a hometown that is written on every passport, school form and wedding invitation, wherever the family now lives. A grandchild in Montreal or Chicago who has never seen Lydda can still be a Liddawi, and the name keeps asking the question of where the family began.
The stakes are real. Arabic names travel badly through foreign paperwork: the Cultural Atlas notes that the same name can be spelled Majid, Majeed or Mejeed, and that some Palestinians abroad use a grandfather's personal name as a surname to fit Western forms. Each of those small changes can loosen the link between a family and its town. Rebecca Roberts' 1999 Durham University study of Bourj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut found that village origin had shaped how the camp was settled, though its social influence had faded over time, which is exactly the slow drift a remembered name resists.
FALASTIN carries a name of this kind too: Falastin (فلسطين) is the Arabic word for Palestine. The brand was founded in Montreal by Jad Sahyoun, a Palestinian born in the diaspora, and it keeps returning to the same idea these surnames hold, that knowing what a word means is part of keeping it. For families raising children far from the towns in their names, teaching that inheritance across generations often starts with something as simple as explaining what the family name means, and what makes Palestinian identity distinct inside the wider Arab family.
At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Palestinian Clothing collection.
100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are Palestinian names structured?
A Palestinian name traditionally runs personal name, father's personal name and grandfather's personal name, often followed by a family name. Lineage passes through the father's side, and women do not traditionally take their husband's name when they marry.
What do Palestinian family names mean?
Most Palestinian family names describe a place, a trade, a crop, a physical trait or an ancestor's nickname. A 2005 study of 8,343 West Bank family names found that about 62% of them describe a way of life, with physical features and agriculture the two largest groups.
Why do so many Palestinian surnames end in -i or -awi?
The ending -i, -awi or -ani turns a place into a name of belonging, called a nisba. Nabulsi means from Nablus, Khalili from al-Khalil (Hebron), Ramlawi from Ramla and Majdalawi from al-Majdal.
What does Abu mean in a Palestinian name?
Abu means "father of" and Umm means "mother of". Parents are respectfully called by their eldest son's name, so the father of Ahmad is Abu Ahmad, and Abu also appears inside some family names, where it can mean "wielder of".
Which Palestinian surnames come from trades?
Common trade surnames include Haddad (blacksmith), Najjar (carpenter), Khayyat (tailor), Khabbaz (baker), Qattan (cotton man), Tahhan (miller) and Qanawati (canal digger), a name held by many Christian families in Bethlehem.
Cover photo: A peasant family of Ramallah, photographed between 1900 and 1910. American Colony Photo Department, Library of Congress. Public domain.