No Lucifers, No Bills, No Pacifics: The Rules Behind Polish Baby Names

Portret-trojga-dzieci-artysty_jan-matejko-1870-fot-MNW.jpg, default, Jan Matejko, Portrait of the Artist's Three Children, 1870, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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There are 1,063,756 women called Anna in Poland, more people than live in Kraków. Last year, eight boys were named Dobromir. Somewhere between those two numbers sits the story of how Poland has named its children – Slavic wishes, Christian saints, Enlightenment novels, and a 2014 law that finally let you call your daughter Jessica.

Traditional, international or original? After your ancestors, literary heroes or maybe after a patron saint to put your child under their protection? One name, two or more? Let’s check what sort of changes have been happening in the fashions for names in the Polish language.

Even though we don’t choose our own names, they stay with us from birth for our whole lives as an important part of our identity. That right is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which ‘a child from the moment it is born will have the right to a name’. Because although its basic function is identification for formal and social reasons, having a name says something about our dignity.

Can you call your child anything you like in Poland?

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Still from the film 'Baby Blues', directed by Katarzyna Rosłaniec, photo: Łukasz Niewiadomski / Kino Świat

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Kadr z filmu "Bejbi blues", reż. Katarzyna Rosłaniec. Scena z filmu, fot. Łukasz Niewiadomski / Kino Świat

Names are given to children the moment their birth certificate is drawn up in the Civil Registry Office. According to the Civil Status Records Act from November 2014, you can pick one or two names, but no more. This is mostly to ensure the need for clarity in identity documents (i.e. to simplify them for processing by Poland’s bureaucratic apparatus) and ignores the wishes of any parents hoping to name their son after all four Beatles or anything else equally creative.

Names also have to be separate and cannot be hyphenated – no Mary-Sues allowed in Poland. They cannot be diminutives (so William would be fine, but not Bill), ‘ridiculous’ or inappropriate (Lucifer, VAT or Courtesan would all be disallowed). The Polish Language Council also recommends avoiding country names and geographical terms (no Monaco or Pacific, thank you).

What are the most popular names in Poland in 2026?

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Still from 'Pham - Golden State (feat. Ben Zaidi)' directed by Grajper, photo: Maciek Ryter / YouTube

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Before 2014, the rules were even stricter. If both parents were Poles, they had to choose names rooted in Polish linguistic tradition. You’d have to call your son Jan instead of John, and your daughter Zdzisława instead of Jessica. You also had to choose names that clearly indicated the sex of the child, i.e. all girls’ names had to end in ‘a’. But once the law changed in 2014, you were finally allowed to name your child something foreign regardless of the parents’ citizenship, and able to pick a name that didn’t grammatically indicate the sex but was generally understood as assigned to one, eg. Nikol.

Sometimes, in a hasty rush to fill in all the paperwork, parents don’t always like the name they so quickly put to paper and start to regret their choice. Luckily, there is a six-month window in which a newborn’s name can be changed to something else. This late administrative change needs to be accompanied by serious justification though, like proving it’s a ‘ridiculous’ name or that the baby has continually been called something else. Should we really take our time and want to change the name of a child who’s already past its 13th birthday, then the child themselves also has to agree.

Despite all the laws listed above, there is no official list of banned names – the Polish Language Council and other linguistic advisors can offer their opinion, but the final decision, like so many in Poland, belongs to the civil servants processing the application. If the name does not fulfil the requirements (say it’s diminutive, ridiculous or inappropriate), then the civil servant has the right – nay, the duty – to throw it out. They even get to pick a new name themselves, a commonly-used one, and the parents have just two weeks to appeal the decision.

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The first ruler of Poland, Duke Mieszko I, is often said to have been called Mieczysław – the latter is an anachronism popularised in the 18^th and 19^th centuries by historians who reckoned ‘Mieszko’ must have been a diminutive, photo: Zbyszko Siemaszko / Forum

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If you’re wondering how many people in Poland have the same name as you, or are wondering if rarer names really are that rare, you can check the freely available database provided by the Ministry of Digitisation at dane.gov.pl. There you’ll find information about given names across different years, according to all the names accumulated in Poland’s PESEL registry (the country’s centralised identity database).

The latest figures posted in January 2026 say the most common boys’ names are Piotr (682,516 people), Krzysztof (631,898) and Tomasz (533,217), while for girls the clear leader is Anna (1,063,756) followed by Katarzyna (602,474) and Małgorzata (572,067). The top tens also include Andrzej, Paweł, Michał, Jan, Marcin, Jakub, Adam, and Maria, Agnieszka, Ewa, Barbara, Magdalena, Elżbieta and Joanna.

But when it comes to newborns, the lists are completely different. In 2025, the most popular names given to baby boys were Nikodem, Antoni, Leon, Jan and Aleksander, and for girls it was Zofia, Zuzanna, Maja, Laura and Hanna.

Trends take time to change. The most popular names in 2024 were Nikodem and Maja. And in 2023 it was back to Nikodem and Zofia again. In 2022, it was Antoni and Zofia, and before that, for 2021, 2020 and 2019, it was Antoni and Zuzanna.

So yes, with one stubborn exception in 2024, a girl born in Poland since 2019 has stood a very good chance of being landed with a name starting with Z.

But let’s go back to the statistics from the start of the century. In the years 2001 to 2012, the top names were Jakub and Julia – yes, for over a decade, it was the same names over and over again. It was only in 2013 that the name Lena dethroned Julia. Jakub was dethroned as late as 2016 by a name you’ve already seen: Antoni.

So those are the most popular names, but what about the rarest? In 2025, among the rarest names given to a boy in Poland were Zbyszko, Teodozjusz, Światosław, Gromisław and Gaweł. There were also a few non-typical Polish names like Riczard and Rajan. When it comes to girls, names that were given to only a handful of children included Wincentyna, Leonora, Laurencja, Henryka, Delfina and Afrodyta.

Is it worth giving your child a middle name?

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The cover of ‘Grażyna: Powieść Litewska’ by Adam Mickiewicz, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa Polona

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The decision to bequeath your child a second name is usually dictated by aesthetic reasons or simply the desire to give them some sort of differentiator when giving them a popular first name (please, dear parents, give your child Jan Nowak some sort of middle name, just so that they can be slightly more Googleable than invisible). The common custom is for that one middle name to be an attempt to get support from a patron saint or care from a deceased member of the family.

Ultimately, giving a child a middle name is down to the parents – they say there are no objective arguments for or against. If you think your child won’t benefit from potential employers googling them, somehow protecting them from online investigation, then by all means name them the simplest and commonest name you can. Maybe they’ll thank you for it. They can, after all, change their name when they become an adult.

But among the middle names Poles do choose to give their children, the clearest winner is Maria – a massive 1,463,775 women have it in their passports, and even 9,606 men. Other popular middle names echo some of the more popular first names: Anna (896,075), Katarzyna, Barbara and Ewa for women, and Jan (634,330), Piotr, Stanisław, Andrzej and Paweł for men.

As a first name, Maria comes only fourth, with 566,902 – respectable, but nothing remarkable. As a middle name it wins by more than half a million. Poles, it turns out, overwhelmingly want Maria somewhere in the paperwork, just not at the front. We’ll look at possible reasons later.

When it comes to children born in 2025, the trends haven’t changed much from what the PESEL registry shows. The most popular middle names for newborn boys were Jan and Piotr, and Maria and Anna for girls.

Giving a name for good luck

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Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa Polona

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Slavic names carried a wish inside their etymology: Bronisław means ‘to defend fame’ – ‘(may he) defend fame’; Kochan, ‘may he be loved’; Świętopełk, ‘holy regiment’ or ‘strong band’ – ‘(may he have) a strong band behind him’. A name that stays with a person for life was meant to work like a shield, a declaration of good fortune for whoever carried it. Bequeathing a name, writes the onomastician Maria Malec, was an anthropological act of a sacral character, by which the child acquired the status of a human being.

Protective names existed across the Slavic world too – decoys used in place of the ‘real’ name to hide it from evil forces when a child’s life seemed at risk. You can spot them by the negation built in: Niedan, Niemir, Niemój (‘Not-given’, ‘Not-peace’, ‘Not-mine’). A child saddled with one of these was supposed to slip past the attention of demons.

How Christianity rewrote the Polish name list

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Introduction of Christianity, painting by Jan Matejko from 1889. Mieszko I is on the right leaning against the cross with the sword in his hand; on the left Saint Adalbert baptizing Mieszko's brother Ścibor. Is it how the Baptism looked?; photo: Wikimedia Commons

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When Poland accepted Christianity in 966 CE, it entered the orbit of Christian culture. Much like in the rest of Christian Europe, the cults celebrating individual saints became popular in Poland, and with them the custom of naming children after martyrs and other saints, as well as Biblical names from the Old and New Testaments. The act of giving a name was associated with organising a christening and, much like how the native names contained wishes, the names from Christian culture were linked to patrons who were to protect their namesakes.

For several centuries, Slavic and Christian names appeared in fairly even numbers. In the 15th century however, the latter became significantly more popular, and in the century after that they had all but driven the native ones out entirely. This followed the recommendations of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which held that names given at baptism should belong to Christian saints. The exceptions were Old Polish names that had acquired patron saints of their own – Kazimierz, Wojciech, Stanisław, Władysław. To this day, Christian names remain the backbone of the Polish go-to stock of names.

Among the names that never really took off in Polish culture were those drawn from ancient and medieval literature – Achilles, Paris, Hector, Roland, Tristan, Isolde – which may well have gone the way of several native Old Polish names after the Council of Trent. A run of Old Testament names failed to catch on too: Abraham, Ezekiel and Isaac were rejected in the 16th century by Protestants.

Meanwhile the Polish name vault gained newly minted saints such as Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Teresa of Ávila. Protestants were also the first to start calling their daughters Maria – for centuries considered an affront to the reverence owed to the Mother of God, with Marianna used as the respectful workaround. This may explain the lopsided statistics mentioned earlier. Centuries of treating Maria as too holy for daily use pushed it into the middle slot, where it could sit quietly doing its devotional work without anyone having to shout it across a courtyard. The taboo may have dissolved a long time ago, but the custom didn’t.

Grażyna, Kordian & the invented names of Polish literature

The weakening of religiosity during the Enlightenment as well as the development of literature kicked off a fashion for giving children the names of literary characters (mostly from French and English literature) and famous people, rather than patron saints. Among these new names, ethnographer Jan Stanisław Bystroń points to the likes of Julia and Edward from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie or the New Heloise, and Malwina and Oskar from James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian. Some names came from Polish literary characters too, such as Grażyna from Adam Mickiewicz’s famed poem, or Kordian and Balladyna from Juliusz Słowacki’s equally popular works.

Old Polish names started to return to fashion after Poland lost its independence in the late 1700s. The revival in patriotism and efforts to maintain a national identity led to people reaching for forgotten Slavic names. In 1827, an entire calendar of Slavic names appeared in a supplement to the Przewodnik Warszawski newspaper, prepared by Tadeusz Wojewódzki. Maria Malec points out that the guide wasn’t without errors:

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Most came from an unfamiliarity about how long-unused names sounded and a lack of ability to correctly read them from the imprecise handwriting of old sources. Some of these errors stuck for good, e.g. Mieczysław instead of Miecisław, Zbigniew instead of Zbygniew, Wieńczysław/Wienczysław instead of Więcesław, Ziemowit instead of Siemowit. A corrected version of the calendar only appeared a hundred years later thanks to Witold Taszycki, esteemed expert on Old Polish names, in ‘An Alphabetic List of Slavic Names’ in the supplement to ‘Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny’ in 1932.

Although Old Polish names linked to the centuries-old veneration of saints are not that popular today, they still pop up now and then. In 2025, 376 baby boys were named Mieszko, 49 Zbigniew and 8 Dobromir, while 27 girls were called Dobrawa, 18 Mirosława and 17 Bogumiła.

How should you choose your child’s name?

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From the "Reborn" series, photo by Karolina Jonderko / Napo Images

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According to contemporary research, religious motivation when choosing a name is fast disappearing. Also less popular is choosing a name according to the calendar and the day on which the child was born – many used to believe that the child themselves had chosen their name by being born on a given day – even though Poland still loves celebrating ‘name days’. Name trends, then as now, reflect the culture around them. The rise in popularity of a given name can be attributed to the successes of well-known people, such as athletes, or the authority of well-known Poles, even Pope John Paul II (Jan Paweł in Polish).

The best name for a child will most certainly be… the one its parents like most. We can turn to aesthetic appreciation, inspirations from ancestors, choose local names or international ones, original or popular. Most importantly, we have to keep in mind the well-being of the child that has to carry that name for the rest of their life.

Of course, if they really hate it, they can always try changing it when they’re an adult. As long as, of course, the office worker that receives their application is having a good day.

Originally written in Polish, April 2026, translated & updated by AZ, Aug 2026

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