Variant spelling of Ezekiel, the Hebrew biblical prophet's name meaning 'God will strengthen'.
Ezikiel is an alternate spelling of Ezekiel, one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible whose name carries one of the most powerful meanings in the entire biblical canon: יְחֶזְקֵאל (Yehezq'el), meaning "God strengthens" or "God will strengthen." The prophet Ezekiel was a priest who was taken into Babylonian captivity around 597 BCE and became one of the most visionary and symbolically dense writers in all of scripture. His book opens with the famous merkabah vision — a cosmic chariot of fire, living creatures with four faces, and wheels within wheels — that has captivated mystics, artists, and philosophers for millennia.
The Book of Ezekiel has had an outsized cultural influence: the Valley of Dry Bones passage (chapter 37) became foundational to the African American spiritual tradition and inspired the hymn "Dem Bones"; the opening vision directly influenced Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) and later Christian apocalyptic literature. Ezekiel's imagery appears in William Blake's prophetic poems, in the Rastafari tradition, and famously in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, where a (fictitious) version of Ezekiel 25:17 became one of cinema's most quoted monologues. The Ezikiel spelling, substituting i for the second e, is a phonetically natural variant that has appeared with increasing frequency in the twenty-first century.
It preserves the name's majestic sound while giving it a slightly more individualized form. The nickname Zeke — energetic, friendly, and immediately recognizable — provides a comfortable everyday alias for a name whose full form carries considerable biblical weight.