In Hebrew the letter י (yod) creates a possessive form when it's postfixed to a word. Take the word מלך (melek), for instance. It means king. When we stick a י (yod) at the end of it, we get מלכי (meleki), which literally means either "king of" or "of king." The latter possibility would normally translate into English as an adjective: "kingly", or rather: "royal."

Hebrew ethnonyms (words that describe where people are from) are also words of that second category. Someone from Israel (ישראל) would be an Israelish (ישראלי).

That means that if someone in the Bible has a name that ends with a י (like, say גרמי, or garmi), it's not always clear whether this is indeed a personal name (Garmi), or an ethnonym (Garmite; someone from a place called Garam, which means bone), or an adjective used as a nickname (Garmi = Bony, which in Hebrew would denote not scrawniness but strength, or rather the propensity to break bones).

Our list below contains only personal names that end on a yod. For a list of ethnonyms that occur in the Bible, open the list of locations & peoples' names.