The name "Jazan" has deep historical roots, appearing in early Arabic sources, including the writings of the historians Al-Hamdani and Al-Ya'qubi, both of whom described Jazan as one of the villages of the Tihamah coast. Notably, the name did not originally refer to a single city; it was used more broadly for the valley itself, known from its source to its mouth, along with the villages along it — meaning "Jazan" was originally the name of a valley and an agricultural district, only later becoming attached to a specific coastal city bearing the same name.
Evidence exists that is far older still. Researchers have pointed to a Musnad inscription (Ancient South Arabian script) from an early period, studied by researcher Yusuf Muhammad Abdullah, which mentions a name close to "Jazan" in the context of the region's valleys — cited as evidence of the name's antiquity and its association with the area since pre-Islamic times. However, this kind of reading of Musnad inscriptions remains a subject of specialized academic debate, and there is no definitive historical consensus on its precise dating.
Linguistically, some popular and general-reference sources circulate a theory tracing the name to a Sabaean origin, formed from "jaz" (a proper name) and "an" (a definite article in Ancient South Arabian languages), giving the name an overall meaning tied to designating a particular place or location. This theory is common in popular articles but is not backed by rigorously documented academic linguistic research, so it should be treated as one circulating interpretation rather than a confirmed linguistic fact.
In general, the origins of place names in the Arabian Peninsula — Jazan included — often remain a matter of scholarly interpretation among historians and linguists, given the succession of languages and cultures (Sabaean, Himyarite, and later Arabic) that passed through the region over thousands of years, and the scarcity of texts that explicitly explain each name's origin. What can be said with confidence is that the name is very old, appears in classical Arabic sources, and was originally tied to a fertile agricultural valley before later coming to denote a coastal city and, eventually, an entire administrative region.
In modern administrative usage, "Jazan" today refers to the administrative region as a whole, while "Jizan" (with an added "i") has become the common name for the coastal city itself, distinguishing it from the region — though the two names are sometimes used interchangeably in the media and in official sources.
Throughout Islamic history, the region was also known by another name: "Al-Makhlaf Al-Sulaymani," after Sulayman bin Tarf Al-Hakami, who united the districts of Hakam and Athr into a single entity — a historical name used in parallel for several centuries before "Jazan" came to predominate in the modern era.