From Latin 'omen' meaning 'sign' or 'portent'; a word name evoking prophecy.
Omen comes directly from Latin, where it meant a sign or portent — an event interpreted as a foreshadowing of things to come, whether propitious or dire. Roman augurs, priests specially trained to read the will of the gods through the behavior of birds and other natural phenomena, built an entire civic and religious system around the interpretation of omens. To take the auspices before a battle, an election, or a founding was not superstition but statecraft; the Latin root *os* or *oris* (mouth, utterance) suggests that omens were understood as a kind of divine speech addressed to those attentive enough to listen.
In modern popular consciousness, the word was dramatically recast by Richard Donner's 1976 horror film *The Omen*, in which a child named Damien is revealed to be the Antichrist. The film's use of the word as atmospheric shorthand for supernatural dread lodged it firmly in popular horror vocabulary. Yet the word itself predates all of this by millennia, and carries an inherent ambiguity — Roman literature speaks equally of good omens and bad ones, and the observation that a name means "sign" makes it as spiritually open as any name could be.
As a given name, Omen is extremely rare — a genuinely bold choice that sits in the company of other single-syllable concept names like Chance, Destiny, and Valor. Parents drawn to it tend to be drawn by its weight and its brevity, by the idea of a child who arrives as a portent of something new and significant. It is a name that demands to be noticed.