Adonay is a variant of Adonai, the Hebrew title meaning "my Lord."
Adonay is a variant of Adonai, one of the most sacred words in the Hebrew tradition. In Biblical Hebrew, *Adonai* is a plural of majesty form of *Adon*, meaning "lord" or "master," and it became the standard spoken substitute for the Tetragrammaton — the four Hebrew letters representing God's personal name, considered too holy to pronounce. The practice of saying Adonai whenever the divine name appeared in scripture gave the word extraordinary liturgical weight, and it has been woven into Jewish prayer and the Torah's oral tradition for more than two millennia.
In Christian Gregorian chant and early polyphony, *Adonai* appears frequently, and Handel's sacred compositions employ it with great solemnity. As a personal name, Adonay took root primarily in Sephardic Jewish communities — those descending from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who carried Iberian-accented Hebrew into the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Americas. In these communities, using divine names or near-divine epithets as personal names was not uncommon, following a tradition that also produced names like Elohim and El.
The Spanish-influenced spelling Adonay reflects the Ladino-speaking Sephardic world, where the name circulated with warmth and familiarity. It also appears among certain Christian communities in Latin America, particularly in evangelical and Pentecostal traditions where Old Testament names carry devotional significance. To name a child Adonay is to drape them in one of the oldest words in the Western religious imagination — a word whispered by generations of worshippers who believed it too sacred for casual use, and yet personal enough to give a child.
The name carries a paradox: immense gravity and tender intimacy at once. In modern use, it functions as both a deeply spiritual statement and a distinctive given name that stands beautifully apart from its more common Biblical peers.