Amour is the French word for love, used as a romantic modern virtue-style name.
Amour is love made into a name — literally. The word descends from Latin amor, the root that gave English 'amorous' and 'amity' and gave French its most essential noun. In Roman mythology, Amor was the god of love, the Latin counterpart to the Greek Eros, depicted as the winged archer whose arrows kindled desire.
The name thus carries millennia of Western romantic tradition in just five letters. In French literature and culture, amour is ubiquitous — from the troubadour poetry of medieval Provence, which codified courtly love as a near-spiritual pursuit, to the chansons of Édith Piaf, who sang 'La Vie en Rose' and made love an anthem of defiant joy. Michael Haneke's 2012 Palme d'Or film Amour brought the word into solemn contemporary relief, reframing it as the devotion that endures suffering and loss.
These layered associations give the name a richness that swings from bliss to gravitas. As a given name, Amour has been used across Francophone Africa, the Caribbean, and increasingly in the United States and United Kingdom, often chosen by parents who want something that is internationally legible, phonetically beautiful, and semantically unambiguous. It works across genders, though it leans feminine in most naming registries. In an era when parents gravitate toward meaningful, concept-driven names, Amour stands apart by being both poetic and plainspoken — a name that requires no explanation.