From Sanskrit Vayu, meaning wind or air, and also the name of the Hindu wind deity.
Vaayu — also spelled Vayu — is one of the oldest named forces in human religious history. In the Vedic tradition, Vayu is the deity of wind and air, one of the five great elements (panchamahabhuta), and appears in the Rigveda, among the oldest texts in any Indo-European language, composed perhaps as early as 1500 BCE. Vayu is not merely the breeze but the animating breath of the cosmos — the force that carries life into the body at birth and carries it away at death.
In the Upanishads, Vayu is declared the supreme among the senses, the one force that all others depend upon. In the Mahabharata, Vayu is the father of Bhima, the mighty second Pandava brother, lending the wind-god a lineage that connects elemental power to heroic strength. Hanuman, the great devotee of Rama in the Ramayana, is also sometimes called Vayuputra — son of Vayu — suggesting that the wind-god's children inherit both swiftness and devotion.
This mythological genealogy gives the name a richness that extends far beyond meteorology. The doubled-a in Vaayu (as opposed to the single vowel Vayu) is a feature of transliterated Sanskrit indicating a lengthened vowel — the name is meant to linger on the breath, appropriately. In contemporary Indian naming, both spellings are used, with parents sometimes choosing the doubled form for its visual distinctiveness. Globally, the name has attracted parents drawn to Sanskrit's unmatched depth of cosmological meaning, and to names that carry genuine philosophical weight — a name that is literally elemental.