Boy Names baby nameSamuel

What does the name Samuel mean?

The different meanings of the name Samuel are:
  • American meaning: Refers to Saul in the Bible
  • French meaning: His name is God
  • Hebrew meaning: God hears
  • Spanish meaning: Asked of God
The meaning of the name “Samuel” is different in several languages, countries and cultures and has more than one possibly same or different meanings available.

Additional information: Samuel is a masculine name that came from the Hebrew Sheum’el, which meant either ‘His Name is God’ or ‘God has heard’. Samuel was the name of the son of Hannah and last ruling judge in the Old Testament, who anointed Saul and David. Foreign variants of the name Samuel include Samuil (Russian), Samuli (Finnish), Samuele (Italian), and Sawyl (Welsh). Samuel has several diminutives in both English (Sam, Sammie, and Sammy) and Finnish (Sami, Samppa, and Samu), and it can also be spelled as Samual or Sameul. Names that sound similar to Samuel are Seamus, Simon, and Shmuel. Feminine variants for the name Samuel are Samantha (English) and Samuela (Italian), and the diminutives Sam and Sami can also be used as feminine names, and both are diminutives for Samantha. Samuel is commonly misspelled as ‘Samule’, ‘Samel’, and ‘Samue’.

Since 1880, Samuel has never fallen out of the top hundred names for boys in the USA, and was the 23rd most popular name in 2014. Its popularity has dipped slightly in England and Wales, but not by much; it was in the top ten names from 1996 to 2006, and fell to 21st in 2014.

Famous people with the name Samuel include Samuel Pepys (English writer), Samuel Morse (inventor of the Morse code), and Samuel Langhorne Clemens (more commonly known by his pen name, Mark Twain).

In Dublin in the 1830s, a blacksmith named Samuel Page and his family were found to be running a satanic cult in the basement of their house. When the locals burned down their house, all of the bodies were found except for Samuel’s, and urban legend suggests that his soul was taken by the devil.