Likely a variant of Uriah, from Hebrew, meaning the Lord is my light or flame.
Yuriah is a variant of the ancient Hebrew name Uriah, written in Hebrew as אוּרִיָּה (Uriyah), meaning "God is my flame" or "God is my light" — a compound of ur (fire, light) and Yah (a form of the divine name YHWH). The name carries one of the most poignant stories in the Hebrew Bible: Uriah the Hittite was a loyal soldier in King David's army whose honorable character stands in stark moral contrast to David's betrayal of him. His story in the Second Book of Samuel has made his name a byword for integrity sacrificed by power.
The name later appeared in English literature through Charles Dickens, whose character Uriah Heep in David Copperfield gave it a very different coloring — sycophantic, scheming, and hypocritical — one of Victorian fiction's most memorably unpleasant villains. This Dickensian shadow kept the name largely out of fashion in the English-speaking world for much of the twentieth century. The variant spelling Yuriah, with its initial Y rendering the Hebrew yod more visibly, offers a path back to the name's Semitic roots and sidesteps some of the Dickens association.
In modern usage, Yuriah belongs to a growing family of Hebrew-rooted names that parents are reclaiming with fresh spellings. Its warm meaning — divine light and fire — resonates across Jewish, Christian, and secular communities, and the spelling gives it a visual distinctiveness that feels both ancient and contemporary at once.