Is Leroy in the Bible? No, It Is French for “The King”

Leroy is not in the Bible. It comes from the French nickname le roi, “the king,” and has been common as an English boy’s name since the 19th century. The Bible does have a name with the same meaning: Melech, Hebrew for “king,” a descendant of King Saul listed in 1 Chronicles 8:35.

What does Leroy mean?

Leroy means “the king.” Roi is the French word for king, and it comes from the Latin rex. Le Roy and Leroy began in France as surnames, perhaps first given to someone who acted like a king, and Leroy is still one of the most common surnames in France, ninth in Behind the Name’s list. Leroi is another spelling. The shorter name Roy has a different origin, the Gaelic ruadh, “red,” though it has often been associated with the French roi.

As a given name Leroy is used for boys. In the United States it ranked among the 100 most common boys’ names every year from 1881 to 1948, reaching 50th in 1907, 1910 and 1935, and it ranked 883rd in 2025. Behind the Name, citing Cleveland Kent Evans’s The Great Big Book of Baby Names, notes that since 1920 it has been used in the United States mainly by African Americans. Among Christian writers who bore it was Le Roy Edwin Froom (1890–1974), a Seventh-day Adventist minister and historian whose four-volume The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers (1946–1954) traces how Christians interpreted Bible prophecy from the first century to the nineteenth.

Is Leroy a Hebrew or Jewish name?

Leroy has no Hebrew origin; it is French. The Hebrew word for king is melech, and it forms several names in the Old Testament. Melech on its own is the name of a man in the family of King Saul: “The sons of Micah: Pithon, Melech, Tarea, and Ahaz” (1 Chronicles 8:35). Micah was the son of Merib-baal and the grandson of Saul’s son Jonathan, and the same list appears again in 1 Chronicles 9:41.

The New Testament translates one of these names itself. The Letter to the Hebrews says that Melchizedek, the king of Salem who blessed Abraham, is “by translation of his name, king of righteousness,” and, as king of Salem, “king of peace” (Hebrews 7:1–2).

Leroy’s meaning in the Bible

Leroy itself has no meaning in the Bible, because the name is not there, but the Latin word it descends from is in the Gospel account of the crucifixion. Pilate put an inscription on the cross that read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” and it was written “in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek” (John 19:19–20). The Latin wording, Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, is the source of the letters INRI on many crucifixes, and its word for king, rex, is the word from which the French roi, and so Leroy, descends.

Pilate wrote the word as a charge against Jesus; Paul, remembering the mercy shown to him, gives it to God in praise: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, and invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17). A boy named “the king” carries a word that belongs first to God.

Related reading

• Why Is Jesus Crowned King?
• Bible Mysteries: Who Is Melchizedek?
• Is Your Name in the Bible? A Directory of 231 Names