Petra

Meaning of Petra

Petra, pronounced PEE-truh in English and PEH-trah in German, is the stately feminine descendant of the Greek Πέτρα, “rock,” a word whose linguistic strata run through Latin petra and ultimately to the Indo-European root *per-, “stone.” As a personal name it first surfaced in early Christian Europe as the female counterpart to Peter—“the rock” upon which the church would be built—yet it never lost its link to the literal stones of the world: the rose-red Nabataean city of Petra, hewn directly from Jordan’s sandstone cliffs, still lends the name an air of sun-baked endurance. In modern culture Petra has appeared on tennis scoreboards (Kvitová’s thunderous left-hand serves), science-fiction pages (Ender’s intrepid comrade Petra Arkanian), and European parliaments alike—quietly reinforcing its reputation for dependable strength rather than flamboyant showmanship. American popularity charts echo this temperament: for more than a century the name has hovered, rock-like, in the mid-hundreds—never crumbling, never erupting—merely offering parents a solid, under-the-radar alternative to trend-chasing choices. Dry wit might suggest that Petra is the geological formation of the baby-name landscape: immovable, quietly impressive, and likely to outlast the fashions swirling around it.