Curious Name: ʻUbayd
by Basil Dragonstrike
You will sometimes see ʻUbayd (or ʻUbaid) as an
Arabic name. While it was, in period, used as a name, through most
of our period, it was part of a name. (But see postscript.)
In Arabic, diminutives of triliteral names (i.e., ones based on
three-letter roots) are rather easy to make, and quite regular in
form. The vowel following the
first letter is changed to (short) "u" and that following the second
to the dihthong "ay" or "ai" (the difference comes from the
romanization method; it is not found in Arabic writing), pronounced
as in Aye or aisle.
The Arabic word ʻAbd shows up in a number of names, and
means "servant"/"slave"; the names are of the form ʻAbd al-____
and use one of the "99 Beautiful Names of God" or simply "Allāh".1
Now, it's important to know that the Arabic letter romanized as ʻ is, in Arabic writing, a full-sized,
regular letter, and not the minor little thing ʻ
might make you expect. So, the ʻ is
followed by a short "u", and the b by "ay". And thus, the
diminutive is ʻUbayd.
Now, I've most usually ʻUbayd used in ʻUbayd Allāh;
"the little servant/slave of the God". While this isn't among the
most popular names, it somehow became well enough known by late
period that some people (particularly in areas where Arabic did not
become the everyday language) simply dropped the Allāh and
used ʻUbayd as a name on its own.
But I have no idea how ʻUbayd turned into the masculine name
ʻUbayda. I'm still looking for information on that.
Postscript: After a lttle more research, I have found one
person from well before Muḥammad's time, called ʻAbīd, and
another that was known by either the same name or its diminutive ---
ʻUbayd. Thus, it's not impossible that some persons
called ʻUbayd without a following Allāh are named
for this person, or somehow get their name from the diminutive of ʻAbīd
(a name I've found nowhere else). However, every ʻUbayd else
I know of gets that name from a truncation of ʻUbayd Allāh.
Return to "Curious Names".
1 A few examples are known of
names using ʻAbd but not a "Name of God", for example ʻAbd
ʻAlī---"servant of ʻAlī".