Likely a variant of Zaira or Zahra, associated with brightness, radiance, or blossoming.
Zayra is an Arabic-origin name, a variant of Zahra and Zaira, derived from the root z-h-r, meaning 'to bloom,' 'to shine,' or 'to flower.' Fatima al-Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, is one of the most venerated figures in Islam, and her epithet al-Zahra — 'the radiant,' 'the blooming one' — has made names of this root among the most beloved in the Muslim world for fourteen centuries. To bear a name from this root is to carry the association of spiritual radiance, of a beauty that is not merely decorative but luminous from within.
Zaira was also the name of a celebrated eighteenth-century tragedy by Voltaire — Zaïre (1732) — set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, in which a Christian-born girl raised in the Ottoman court navigates faith, love, and identity. The play was enormously successful across Europe, keeping the name circulating in Western literary consciousness long after its immediate popularity faded. Later, the Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini wrote an opera Zaira in 1829, further embedding the name in the European cultural imagination as something exotically beautiful and poignantly tragic.
The spelling Zayra is particularly prevalent in Spain and Latin America, where Arabic names entered the language during the centuries of Moorish presence in the Iberian Peninsula, becoming naturalized into Spanish phonology. In contemporary Latin American naming culture, Zayra has a fresh, modern feeling while remaining rooted in that deep Andalusian-Arabic heritage. Its 'y' gives it visual distinction from the more common Zahra or Zaira without altering its essential character — flowering, bright, full of the particular beauty that comes from something growing toward light.