The church’s magazine also identified the name Alma as another common, non-biblical word. In the Book of Mormon, Alma is a male’s name. The existence of Alma as an ancient Jewish name for males was unknown even to modern scholarship until the mid-twentieth century. However, the Latin word “Alma” was a female name in Anglo-European-American culture for centuries before the 1800s. The 1829 Encyclopedia Americana noted that “alma” meant “cherishing nourishing, fostering, bountiful, dear.” Likewise, the Book of Mormon began using “Bountiful” for New World geography in the Book of Alma (Alma 22:29). Previously, the text applied “Bountiful” to an Old world location, apparently in the Arabian peninsula.

Aside from its “bountiful” meaning, Alma also had reference to spirits, ceremonial magic, and treasure. In an 1828 Spanish-English dictionary published in Boston, the first meaning of “alma” was “soul, the immaterial spirit of ma,” and the first meaning of soul was “alma.” A seventeenth-century English magic manuscript also used “Alma” as one of the names to conjure a treasure guardian-spirit. In other English manuscripts of magic (one dated sometime before 1739), “Almazim” and “Almazin” were names of a “giver of treasure.”