Achim is a German short form of Joachim, from Hebrew meaning established by God.
Achim is the crisp German and Hebrew short form of Joachim — itself a Hellenized rendering of the Hebrew *Yehoyaqim*, meaning 'God will establish' or 'may Yahweh raise up.' The name Joachim appears in the Hebrew Bible as the birth name of the Judean king Jehoiakim, who ruled during the Babylonian ascendancy, and later entered Christian tradition as the name given by apocryphal gospels to the father of the Virgin Mary — a figure never named in the canonical New Testament but beloved in medieval devotion.
This second association made Joachim a saint's name with a feast day, and the compressed form Achim (also spelled Akim in Slavic traditions) spread through German-speaking Lutheranism as a vernacular alternative. In German cultural memory, the name connects to Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), the Romantic poet and novelist who co-edited *Des Knaben Wunderhorn* (The Youth's Magic Horn) with Clemens Brentano — the famous anthology of German folk poetry that inspired Brahms, Mahler, and Strauss. Von Arnim was also the husband of Bettina von Arnim, herself a celebrated writer, and together they represent one of German Romanticism's most creatively charged partnerships. Today Achim persists in Germany as a name with a mid-century feel — it had its peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s — while its brevity and clean consonant structure have attracted parents in the broader European diaspora who want a name that is biblical in ancestry, historically textured, and effortlessly modern in its three-letter directness.