Khadija — Name Meaning in Islam

Root: خ-د-ج (kh-d-j). The classical dictionaries connect the name to a birth that came early, and the lexicographers note it was given in pre-Islamic Arabia without the sense being felt as a description — much as many names are given for their sound and their bearers rather than their literal root.

Who carried it: Khadija bint Khuwaylid, the Prophet's ﷺ first wife and the first person to accept Islam. She was a merchant of standing in Makkah who employed him before she married him, and it was to her that he came shaking from the cave of Hira; her answer — that Allah would not disgrace a man who carried the burdens of others — is one of the best-known passages in the biography. She supported the Muslims through the boycott of the Banu Hashim and died in the tenth year of the mission, a year the sources call the Year of Sorrow.

Spellings: Khadija, Khadijah, Hatice (Turkish), Khadijah (Indonesian), Khadija (Urdu), خديجة.

Pronunciation: kha-DEE-ja — the opening kh is the sound at the back of the throat, as in Scottish "loch".