Rouh comes from Arabic and Persian usage meaning soul or spirit.
Rouh is an Arabic name transliterated from روح, meaning 'soul,' 'spirit,' or 'breath of life.' It is among the most philosophically resonant words in the Arabic lexicon, appearing in the Quran in one of its most deliberate mysteries: when asked about the spirit, the Prophet is told to say that 'the ruh is from the command of my Lord, and of knowledge you have been given only a little' (17:85). That verse makes the word simultaneously sacred and deliberately unknowable — a name that names the unnameable.
Across the Islamic world, Ruh and its variant Rouh have been used both as standalone names and as components of compound names such as Ruhallah (Spirit of God), a title given to the mystic poet Rumi and, in the twentieth century, adopted as a honorific for Ayatollah Khomeini. In Persian, Sufi, and Arabic poetic traditions, ruh is the substance that animates love poetry, the breath that connects the human to the divine. Poets from Rumi to Ibn Arabi treat the ruh as both the self's most intimate core and its most cosmic dimension simultaneously.
As a given name, Rouh has a quietly contemplative quality that sets it apart from names that announce ambition or beauty. It whispers of interiority. Parents in Iranian, Lebanese, and South Asian Muslim communities have used it across centuries, and it has recently attracted attention from parents outside Islamic traditions who are drawn to names that carry philosophical rather than purely ornamental weight. The variant spelling 'Rouh' softens the word's visual appearance for Western readers while preserving its breath-like sound.