Polish Baby Names, With Meanings and Data

What Poland called its babies in 2025

Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs publishes a first-name ranking twice a year, drawn from the PESEL national population register, with the full dataset released on the government open data portal. The ranking below is the ministry's release of 2 February 2026 covering the second half of 2025. Zofia and Nikodem led both halves of the year.

Against the first half of 2025, Zuzanna moved up one place and Maja down one, Emilia entered the top 10 from twelfth, and Leon climbed from fourth to third, pushing Jan down to fourth. The ministry also lists names chosen by parents avoiding the mainstream, among them Blanka, Jaśmina, Liwia, Aurora and Florentyna for girls and Liam, Nataniel, Samuel and Aron for boys.

Polish names with documented meanings

The British counts are from the Office for National Statistics datasets for England and Wales, covering births registered in 2025 and published on 9 July 2026. The ONS strips diacritics, so Stanisław is recorded as Stanislaw.

What the two datasets show

The Slavic layer is the distinctively Polish one

Most of Poland's top 10 is shared with the rest of Europe: Zofia, Hanna, Julia, Emilia, Jan, Jakub, Aleksander. The names that are Polish rather than merely used in Poland are the compounds ending in -sław, meaning "glory": Stanisław, Mirosław, Bronisław, Wiesław. That is the same two-element system that produced Germanic and Norse names, running on Slavic roots, and it is still visibly alive in Poland while it has stopped being so almost everywhere else in Europe.

Poland's favourites are not Britain's Polish favourites

Franciszek, Ignacy, Stanisław and Mikołaj are all high in Poland and low here: 30, 26, 21 and 27 babies respectively in England and Wales in 2025. The exception is Leon, at 526 and essentially flat against 545 in 2024. Nikodem, meanwhile, fell from 121 boys to 74 in a single year, the sharpest decline of any name on this page, at the same time as it was holding first place in Poland itself.

Movement, on two dated points

Comparing the ONS 2024 and 2025 files, Aleksander rose from 65 boys to 84 and Iga from 16 girls to 21, while Kalina fell from 18 to 12, Szymon from 22 to 14 and Stanislaw from 34 to 21. Numbers this small bounce around from year to year, and the honest reading is that Polish names in Britain are broadly stable rather than trending in either direction. Total registrations in the ONS files fell about 1.8 per cent for girls and 1.5 per cent for boys across the same two years, which accounts for part of any small decline.

Polish names are among the most used foreign names in Britain

Poland is one of the largest countries of birth among mothers registering births in England and Wales, and the ONS files show it. Leon at 526, Hanna at 122, Antoni at 85, Maja at 85, Nikodem at 74 and Zofia at 69 are all comfortably inside the published tables. Several of them — Leon, Hanna, Julia, Emilia, Laura — look like ordinary British names on the page, which is exactly why they transfer so easily. Others, such as Wojciech and Kazimierz, sit in single figures.

Choosing a Polish name

Decide what happens to the diacritics. Stanisław, Mikołaj and Jaśmina all carry letters that British systems will silently change. The barred l is not an l and the accented s is not an s, and a child recorded one way at the registrar and another at school will spend years correcting it. Choose the form you want on the certificate deliberately rather than by default.

Expect the diminutive. Polish forms an affectionate version of almost every name, and in family use they are not optional: Zofia becomes Zosia, Zuzanna becomes Zuzia, Jakub becomes Kuba, Aleksander becomes Olek, Stanisław becomes Stasiek. If you dislike the diminutive, choosing the full name will not protect you from it.

Second names still carry the tradition. The ministry's data shows the most common second names in Poland remain Jan, Piotr and Józef for boys and Maria, Anna and Zofia for girls, a far more conservative set than the first names. If family expectation is pulling one way and your own taste another, that is where Polish families have always settled it.