Oprah Winfrey revealed in a recent podcast appearance that the name the world recognizes is not the one listed on her birth certificate.
During a conversation with Keke Palmer on Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, Winfrey revisited a piece of trivia that has followed her for decades: the story behind her first name, which is spelled Orpah on her birth certificate and was inspired by the biblical figure in the Book of Ruth.
Winfrey said the familiar spelling, Oprah, stuck early on because family members and others around her kept pronouncing it that way, and the mistake eventually became the version everyone knew.
“I found out that your name was originally Orpah,” Palmer, 32, said.
Winfrey confirmed that the name has biblical roots and explained that the switch to Oprah was never a deliberate personal decision, but something that happened naturally as people kept saying it differently.
“It’s not what made me,” said the TV icon, “I was a kid a nobody knew how to spell it.”
She then described how the spelling on her birth certificate differs from the name that became famous.
“It turned out that on birth certificate, it’s Orpah, and then people started calling me Oprah. And so it’s just a difference between the P being before the R or after the R.”
“Once they started with Oprah, that’s it,” she added. “I didn’t learn until I was probably 20 or something that ‘Oh, this isn’t really my name.'”
Elsewhere in the interview, Winfrey also looked back on a career moment she now considers a misstep: recording her own version of The Oprah Winfrey Show theme, ‘Run On’, in 1998.
“That is one of the mistakes of my career,” she said of the track that was only her show’s theme song for a short time.
She said the decision came at a time when she was weighing up whether to continue with the show.
“I was trying to decide, am I going to end the show or not end the show? And then I had a little talk with Jesus, and Jesus said, ‘You gotta’ keep going.’ And so I said, you know, there’s this song. It’s an old spiritual.”
Even after taking singing lessons ahead of the recording, Winfrey admitted she quickly accepted that music was not her strength.
Palmer attempted to defend the track, but Winfrey was unconvinced.
She insisted: “You know it was bad. You’re just saying that because you’re looking at me. It was pretty bad.”
The song lasted as the opening theme for just one season of the long-running talk show, which was on air from 1986 until 2011.
After 25 seasons, the program came to an end as Winfrey moved on to launch her own cable network, Oprah Winfrey Network, also known as OWN.
Today, Winfrey remains one of the most recognizable figures in media, but the name she uses professionally still traces back to a childhood spelling mix-up that simply never went away.