Baby names that mean “joy”: Beautiful choices for a child who changed everything

There’s a particular kind of joy that arrives with a newborn, the kind that rearranges everything that came before it, priorities, routines, entire ways of seeing the world, almost overnight. For a lot of parents, naming a child after that feeling isn’t sentimental so much as it is simply accurate, a way of putting into words exactly what this tiny person has already done to their lives. Beyond the familiar names most lists reach for, dozens of languages carry their own quiet, lesser-known words for joy, some tied to light, some to celebration, and some to the sheer fact of a happy child existing. Here are seven names worth considering if you want one that’s genuinely different.