Hamish
HAY-mish. Stress HAY, rhyming with day; mish rhymes with fish.
One English form
Phonetic notation
/ˈheɪ.mɪʃ/
Hamish comes from addressing James in Gaelic. Seumas is the Scottish Gaelic form of James. Address someone named Seumas in Gaelic and you say “a Sheumais”; Hamish is an anglicized form of Sheumais.123
Sheumais is a grammatical form used in direct address, not a modern nickname for Seumas.
Hamish belongs to James’s name family rather than having a separate word meaning of its own.
Saying Hamish in English
HAY-mish: HAY rhymes with “day”; mish rhymes with “fish”. Emphasise HAY.2
Sources
- Hamish — Scottish National Dictionary, Vol. X personal names (1976), DSL, dsl.ac.uk (opens in a new tab)
- Hamish — Wiktionary, en.wiktionary.org (opens in a new tab)
- Speaking Our Language — episode 52 clip 7, LearnGaelic, learngaelic.scot (opens in a new tab)
Researched from sources and checked in a separate review. We list reference works, not other baby-name websites. Last revised 4 October 2026.
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