A variant of Khairi from Arabic khayr, meaning goodness, charity, or kindness.
Khayri derives from the classical Arabic root khayr (خير), a word of remarkable breadth meaning "goodness," "virtue," "well-being," and "that which benefits." In Arabic, khayr is one of the most ethically loaded words in the language — it forms the basis of charitable giving (sadaqa al-khayr), blessings exchanged in greeting, and the Islamic concept of living a life oriented toward benefit to others. To name a child Khayri is to express a profound hope: that this person will be, in their very essence, a source of goodness in the world.
The name appears across the Arab world and throughout Muslim communities in Africa, South Asia, and the diaspora. In Egyptian and Sudanese naming traditions especially, Khayri has a warm, established history — several Egyptian scholars, poets, and public figures have carried the name across the 20th century. The variant spellings Khairy, Kheiri, and Kheyri reflect the different phonetic conventions of Arabic's many regional dialects, but all point back to the same luminous root.
Philosophically, Khayri belongs to a tradition of names that function almost as benedictions — a parent's prayer spoken aloud every time the child is called. Names meaning goodness, blessing, or grace appear in nearly every human naming tradition, but Arabic's khayr is unusually compact and pure, an entire ethical worldview compressed into five letters. Khayri carries that weight lightly, sounding both ancient and effortlessly modern.