A rare modern adoption from the English word arson; treated today as a name by sound and style rather than lineage.
Arson, used as a given name, almost certainly derives not from the English legal term for deliberate fire-setting but from the ancient Greek and early Christian name Arsenios (Ἀρσένιος), meaning "virile, strong, masculine" — from the Greek "arsēn" (male, manly). The name passed through Latin as Arsenius and became a prominent name in Eastern Christianity, carried most famously by Saint Arsenius the Great (c. 354–449 AD), a Roman deacon who became one of the Desert Fathers of Egypt, renowned for his ascetic discipline and his aphorism that a monk should "flee, be silent, be at rest."
Arsen and Arseni remain living given names across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. The name is particularly common in Georgia (the country), Armenia, Russia, and among Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities more broadly. Georgian bearers include historical princes of the Bagrationi dynasty.
The French variant Arsène was made culturally vivid by Maurice Leblanc's gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin, first published in 1905, a figure of wit, elegance, and theatrical audacity who became one of French popular fiction's most enduring characters. The English spelling "Arson" introduces an unmistakable phonetic collision with the fire-related legal term, which will generate inevitable double-takes in Anglophone contexts. Whether this is a liability or a feature depends entirely on the family's aesthetic sensibility.
The name carries real historical and spiritual weight beneath its combustible surface, and in communities familiar with the Arsenios tradition it reads as a straightforward, honorable inheritance. For those who love it, the edge is the point.