View Message

Did you look it up on this site? Keisha is in the main database ...

A quick glance at Google shows most of the references to Keisha meaning "favorite" just say "African", which as elbowin pointed out is simply not to be trusted. I have found a couple of places that claim it's Swahili, but Swahili tends to be the African language that people will come up with as the origin when they are guessing where an "African" name would be from, and it's often wrong -- as it almost surely is in this case. Available online English/Swahili dictionaries do not included Keisha as a Swahili word. Kisha in Swahili is an adverb meaning "afterwards, theraeafter, then" and kesha in Swahili means "vigil". There probably isn't an exact equivalent in Swahili to the English word "favorite" -- some online dictionaries suggest mpenzi or kipenzi, but when you type those back into the dictionary you get "pets" for the former and "partner" for the latter.

---

Keisha is one of those names that it's really hard to figure out exactly where it came from. It became regularly used about the same time as Kecia and there was a lot of confusion between them, and Kecia seems to be a Finnish respelling of Kesia, the Swedish form of Keziah. But Keisha may actually have a different origin and just got confused with Kecia and so may not really come from Keziah originally. I don't think it's likely to be from some African language, though, because even though it quickly became especially popular with African-Americans, some of the earliest examples are White women in the USA.

This message was edited 5/2/2022, 9:42 AM