Hellenized form of Hebrew Zechariah meaning 'God remembers.' Biblical prophet and priest name.
Zacharias is the Greek and Latin form of the Hebrew name Zechariah — זְכַרְיָה (Zekharyah) — meaning "God has remembered" or "Yahweh remembers," a theophoric name that carries within it both a claim about divine attention and an implicit comfort: to be so named is to assert that one has not been overlooked by the sacred. The name appears more than thirty times in the Hebrew Bible borne by different individuals, most prominently the prophet Zechariah, whose visions of apocalyptic imagery and messianic restoration fill one of the more complex books of the Hebrew canon.
In the New Testament, Zacharias — specifically spelled in the Greek manner — is the name of the priest who is the father of John the Baptist. His story in the Gospel of Luke is one of the more dramatically rendered in the infancy narratives: visited by the angel Gabriel and told that his elderly wife Elizabeth would bear a son, he doubts and is struck mute until the child's birth and naming, at which point he speaks again and delivers the Benedictus, one of the great canticles of Christian liturgy. This narrative gave Zacharias enormous prestige in both Eastern and Western Christianity, and the name spread widely across Christendom in its various phonological forms: Zechariah in English Protestant tradition, Zaccaria in Italian, Zacharie in French, Sakarias in Scandinavian. Zacharias offers the full sonorous weight of its five syllables that the clipped Zachary trades away for ease, and it has found favor among parents who want a name that feels simultaneously ancient, liturgically resonant, and grandly unabbreviated — the version you use in the baptismal register, even if daily life shortens it.