A name that stayed a name
In present-day English, Nahum is not a common noun. It does not name a tool, a feeling, or an action. It is a proper name with three tightly related uses: the seventh of the Twelve Minor Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament; the short prophetic book attributed to him; and, far more rarely, a masculine given name taken from that biblical figure. English dictionaries treat the prophet and the book as the main senses. The everyday pronunciations, NAY-um and NAY-hum, already show how far the word has been fitted to English: the original Hebrew consonant ḥ is gone, and stress sits on the first syllable.
The man behind the name is almost a blank. The book's opening line calls him Nahum the Elkoshite and then never returns to his biography. Later tradition places his activity in the seventh century BCE, after the Assyrian sack of Thebes in 663 and before Nineveh fell in 612. Those dates belong to the prophecy, not to the English word, but they explain why the name reached Europe at all: it travelled as a heading in Scripture.
How the form reached English
The origin of the word nahum in English is a history of Bible translation, not of native Germanic inheritance. English took the name from Hebrew נַחוּם, usually romanized Naḥūm. From Hebrew it passed into the Greek Septuagint as Ναούμ and into the Latin Vulgate as Nahum. Western readers for centuries met the Latin spelling first.
English lexicographers date the word to the fourteenth century, which matches the first complete English Bible. In John Wycliffe's version the book opens as the vision of Naum the Elkoshite. That spelling, without a medial h, follows Greek and Latin more closely than later English practice. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translators, working with a sharper sense of the Hebrew text, restored the h and settled the form still used in the Authorized Version and in modern English: Nahum. The name did not arrive through trade or slang. It arrived as a biblical label and stayed one.
Luke's genealogy lists another ancestor as Naoum, rendered Nahum in English Bibles. That figure is otherwise unknown and is not the prophet of Nineveh. The coincidence shows how English treats the name: as a ready-made Hebrew personal name, reused wherever the Greek or Hebrew text supplies it.
The root, not a folk story
Hebrew dictionaries derive Naḥūm from the three-consonant root n-ḥ-m. The verb built on that root is usually cited as nāḥam, but a single English gloss will not cover it. In the piel stem it is the ordinary biblical verb for comforting or consoling someone in grief. In the niphal the same consonants can mean to be comforted, yet they are just as often the verb for relenting, regretting, or turning back from a planned course, including passages in which God is said to relent from disaster. Standard lexica therefore list consolation and remorse under one root. An older, more speculative suggestion, based on an Arabic verb for panting or snorting, would take the first picture as a heavy breath or sigh. That comparison is not secure, and it should not be offered as the proven source of the Hebrew meanings.
The personal name is commonly explained as comfort, consolation, or comforted. Those are not identical claims about Hebrew morphology. The vocalization naḥūm resembles a qattūl-type pattern, which in Semitic naming often has a passive or result sense, so comforted is a fair reading. Other scholars treat the name as a shortened theophoric form, a clipped version of a longer name such as Nehemiah, whose second element is the divine name and whose whole sense is that the Lord comforts. The Book of Nahum itself never spells out that longer form. The superscription gives only the short name and the unexplained hometown Elkosh, whose site is still unknown.
Related names, not English offspring
English did not grow a family of common words from this root. What it received, again through biblical and Jewish naming, is a cluster of related Hebrew names. Nehemiah adds a theophoric ending to the same consonants. Menahem is the piel participle, a comforter, used both as a personal name and as a royal name in the northern kingdom. Later Jewish tradition keeps Nachum and Nachman; Yiddish keeps Nokhem as a living given name. Aramaic has a cognate verb for comfort. Phoenician attests the root in personal names. Greek churches read Naoum; Latin reads Nahum; several Slavic traditions use Naum.
The Galilean place name Capernaum, from Hebrew Kfar Naḥum, village of Nahum, preserves the same personal name in geography. That does not prove the village commemorates the prophet who wrote against Nineveh. It only shows that Nahum was an ordinary enough Hebrew name to mark a settlement. Jerome and others later tried to locate Elkosh in Galilee and so to tie the prophet to Capernaum; the link is traditional, not demonstrated.
As an English given name, Nahum has always been scarce. When it appears, it usually points back to the biblical book rather than to an independent fashion. The poet laureate Nahum Tate is the stock example.
What did not change
Inside English the meaning of Nahum has barely moved. It never became a common noun for consolation. It never developed a transferred or slang sense. The prophet, the book, and the rare baptismal name are still the whole story.
What later readers added is a tension between the name and the book. Nahum's three chapters are a fierce poem on the coming ruin of Nineveh. Commentators have long noticed that a prophet whose name is built on comfort writes almost entirely of judgment on an empire. One long-standing reading takes the name as comfort for Judah after generations of Assyrian pressure. A more specific literary argument holds that the opening of the book alludes to a line in Isaiah in which God is comforted by being avenged. That is a question about how the Hebrew book uses its own title, not about how English borrowed the word.
The durable English fact is smaller. English took a Hebrew personal name whose root covers both comforting and relenting, kept the later spelling with h as a nod to the Hebrew consonant, and used it as a label for a prophet, a book, and the occasional son named after both. The Wycliffe form Naum is the concrete remainder of the older path: before printers standardized Nahum, a medieval English reader could still meet the prophet under the Greek and Latin shape of the name.