Also Italian (Rare) pronounced a-dza-REE-a. Since national statistics (1999) it has been used nearly every year until 2015 with less than five Azaria born each year. After 2015 no baby has been called Azaria. It is masculine only as far as I know.
Azaria De' Rossi (De' Rossi is the surname, 1513-1574) was an Italian-Jewish physician and scholar. It is also known abroad as Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi.
My husband picked this name for our daughter. I love her name and her sister's is pretty cool also Zakaria... their friends always ask how we picked them. I tell them I needed a lot of God's love after my son passed so he brought me these two angels.
As someone stated before, Azaria was falsely rumoured to mean "desert sacrifice" or "sacrifice in the wilderness" during the Lindy Chamberlain case. Ms Chamberlain actually found the name in the book 1001 Unusual Baby Names, which identified it as meaning "Blessed of God", and a feminine form of the Biblical Hebrew name Azariah (not strictly true etymologically - according to Behind the Name, Azariah actually means "Yahweh [God] has helped"). Coincidentally there is a very similar Biblical name, Azazel, which is supposedly the name of a wilderness demon to whom a goat was sent out on Yom Kippur in the Old Testament. Perhaps this was the origin of the Azaria rumour.
― Anonymous User 7/24/2012
2
This name sounds more feminine than masculine in my opinion.
Hank Azaria is an actor possibly best known for his work on the cartoon The Simpsons; he plays, among others, Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Apu, Comic Book Guy, Cletus, and Professor Frink. He's had roles in live action television shows and movies, too, including Grosse Pointe Blank, The Birdcage, and Tuesdays With Morrie.
Azaria has also been used for girls. One of the best-known female bearers of this name was Azaria Chamberlain, a little girl who was stolen by a dingo near Uluru, Australia. After her mother was falsely accused of her murder, rumours flew around that Azaria meant "desert sacrifice" (Uluru being in the desert), leading to perhaps one of the few cases where a judge has made a legal pronouncement over whether or not a name had a particular meaning.
https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azaria_(nome)
https://www.name-doctor.com/meaning/azaria-1