Amariah

Meaning of Amariah

Amariah, a theophoric derivative of the Hebrew verb ’amar (“to speak”) conjoined with the divine element Yah, translates most precisely as “Yahweh has spoken” or, more loosely, “God’s promise,” and it originally appears in the Hebrew Bible as a masculine appellation borne by several priests in the post-exilic period; in contemporary Anglo-American usage, however, it functions almost exclusively as a feminine given name whose cross-linguistic phonetic shape—ah-mah-REE-ah in Italian and Spanish, and the more compact ə-MAR-ee-ə in English—retains a melodic, vowel-forward contour appreciated for its easy international portability. The statistical profile in the United States confirms a quiet but enduring presence: since first re-entering the national register in 1980, Amariah has hovered in the lower half of the Top 1,000, with annual occurrences ranging from a low of five births (1990) to a recent high of 179 (2024), a pattern that denotes niche appeal rather than transient trendiness. Literary parents value its semantic allusion to divine utterance, historians note its biblical provenance among the post-exilic priesthood, and modern namers often highlight its phonological kinship to the more familiar Amara and Mariah, yet Amariah remains sufficiently uncommon to confer individuality while anchoring the bearer in a tradition of covenantal assurance.