Likely from Hebrew Ro'i or Roee, meaning 'my shepherd' or 'shepherd.'
Roey is most at home in Israeli naming culture, where it functions as a fully modern Hebrew given name written רועי and meaning "my shepherd" or "my friend" — the possessive suffix "i" turning the ancient pastoral noun into something tenderly personal. The shepherd as metaphor runs through Hebrew scripture like a golden thread: Psalm 23 opens "The Lord is my shepherd" (יהוה רועי), and the great patriarchs Abraham, Moses, and David all tended flocks before they led nations. Naming a child Roey is thus to drape them in thousands of years of imagery linking care, vigilance, and gentle leadership.
In Israel the name became popular in the latter decades of the twentieth century as part of a wave of proudly native Hebrew names that consciously moved away from both Diaspora Yiddish names and heavily biblical names toward words that felt rooted in the modern Hebrew landscape. Roey has a breezy, sunlit quality in spoken Israeli Hebrew — two open syllables that feel informal and warm. It is a name heard on kibbutzim and Tel Aviv playgrounds alike, belonging firmly to Israeli-born generations.
Outside Israel, Roey travels with emigrant families and has begun appearing in Jewish communities in the United States, Australia, and Western Europe, sometimes as a nod to Israeli heritage and sometimes simply because parents find its sound appealing and its spelling elegantly minimal. It occasionally intersects with the older Gaelic-rooted Roy, meaning "red" and carried by figures from Rob Roy MacGregor to Roy Rogers, but the two names are unrelated in origin. Roey's distinctiveness lies in its quietly devotional meaning — a name that whispers of watching over and being watched over.