Short form of Ebenezer, Hebrew meaning stone of help, a biblical memorial name.
Eben is a Hebrew masculine name meaning "stone" or "rock," derived from the Hebrew even (אֶבֶן). It functions both as a standalone name and as a shortened form of the more elaborate Ebenezer, which means "stone of help" and appears dramatically in the First Book of Samuel, where the prophet Samuel erects a stone monument after a battle victory and names it Ebenezer to commemorate divine assistance. This biblical grounding gives Eben a quiet but unshakeable solidity — it is, quite literally, built from stone.
The name achieved its most famous literary embodiment through Ebenezer Scrooge, Charles Dickens's immortal miser in A Christmas Carol (1843), though notably Dickens himself seemed aware of the name's then-declining fashionability, using it partly to signal old-fashioned severity. Before Scrooge weighed the name down, Ebenezer was common among English Nonconformists and American Puritans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who prized its scriptural directness. The shorter Eben largely escaped the Dickensian shadow, retaining a clean, lapidary simplicity.
In contemporary usage, Eben has experienced a modest revival, appreciated precisely for its brevity and its deep etymological roots. It is especially favored in Wales and Cornwall, where it blends naturally with the Celtic naming landscape, and among families in the United States seeking short, strong biblical names that feel less common than Noah or Eli. The name's stoniness — its monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon sound — makes it feel both ancient and surprisingly modern.