An Arabic-influenced feminine form related to words for brightness and radiance, used in Iberian and Arabophone naming.
Soraia is the Portuguese and Spanish rendering of Soraya, itself derived from the Arabic "Thurayya" — the proper name for the Pleiades, the stunning star cluster in the constellation Taurus. In classical Arabic poetry and astronomy the Pleiades occupied an exalted position, used as a navigational guide and a symbol of unattainable beauty.
To name a daughter Thurayya or one of its variants was to compare her to a cluster of stars, brilliant and slightly out of reach. The name gained international visibility through Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, the second wife of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, whose striking beauty and tragic story — she was divorced in 1958 because she could not bear an heir — made her a sympathetic figure in the European press of the 1950s and 60s. In Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula the name entered popular consciousness partly through her and partly through the Colombian pop singer Soraya, who achieved wide recognition in the 1990s before her early death from breast cancer at forty.
Soraia as a specifically Portuguese spelling carries the soft warmth of Lusophone phonology, the final vowel opening the name into something almost musical. It remains common in Portugal, Brazil, and among Portuguese-speaking communities worldwide — a name that manages to be simultaneously glamorous, rooted in astronomical antiquity, and tenderly familiar in the mouths of those who love it.