RICH CULTURE: Popular Yoruba Names And Their English Meanings

Yoruba, Hausa and the Igbo tribes are the 3 most common tribes in Nigeria today.

The natives of Yorubaland are in the habit of naming a child in order of place, circumstances surrounding his or her birth as well as in honour of an ancestor.

Listed below are few Yoruba names and their meanings in English Language.


Name                  Meaning

Ajayi——–A child born with face turned downwards

Aina——Is the female of Ojo(of the two names, Ijebu tribe uses Aina,it is proverbial that (Ijebu Kii je Ojo),”Ijebus never bear the name Ojo.”

Dada—–Children with knotted hair or dreads

Ilori——Conceived after a previous birth, before resumption of mensturation

Oke—–A child wrapped in a thin membrane at birth, (The Amniotic sac)

Taiwo—-The first to arrive of a twin

Kehinde—The last to arrive of a twin

Eta Oko—The third child in a Triplet

Ojo———-A male child that has his umbilical cord tied around his neck at birth.

Talabi——-A child born with the head and body covered with Caul like a masquerade

Oni———A baby whose incessant cry at birth suggest that he/she is in distress

Ige ——–A baby that came out of the womb with feet first

Idowu—–A child born after a set of twins.

Alaba——A child born after Idowu

Olugbodi—-A child born with the sixth finger

Erinle——–A child born with an umbilical cord around his wrist.

PHOTOS: Artist Spends 20 Years Building Life-Size Replica Of Noah’s Ark

Inspired by Noah’s Ark from the Book of Genesis, Dutch artist Johan Huibers built a modern day replica spending a whopping $1.2 million on it. His reasons for building the vessel  – he feared the effects global warming would someday have on his country, flooding included. The idea came to him in 1992, when he had a dream about his native land submerged in a flood similar to the one in the Book of Genesis. He continued to think about it until he finally did something about it. And the result is a 130m long, 29m wide, 23m high ark that he completed in 2005. Weighing almost 3000 tons and built from Swedish pine reinforced with steel, it is quite hard to believe that ark might be seaworthy at all, but this modern-day Noah assures us it does indeed float.