Alfons
Around 2,000 Polish men carry it, and hardly any boys have been given it in recent years, so meeting one sticks with you. At root it's Latin, meaning "noble and ready".
Alfons Pronunciation
Alfons is pronounced AHL-fons (/ˈalfɔns/).
What Alfons means
Where Alfons comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Alfons comes into Polish through the Latin form Alfonsus, the shape the name wore in baptismal records and church calendars. The sense attached to it is "noble and ready," in Polish szlachetny i gotowy, a pairing that reads almost like a small motto. Two ideas sit beside each other in it: high birth and a willingness to act.
The Polish calendar marks Alfons on the first of August, the feast of Alphonsus Liguori, an eighteenth-century bishop and founder of the Redemptorists. Another bearer left the name on posters across Europe. The painter Alfons Maria Mucha gave his Art Nouveau women to the visual style of the 1890s.
In the family of the name stand Alfred and Alfredo, both listed as related forms. The full Alfons feels formal now, a little old-fashioned in Poland. On an official form at the urząd the name looks grand, almost ceremonial. What holds under it is the old meaning: szlachetny i gotowy, noble and ready.
When Alfons celebrates name day
Alfons appears 8 times in the Polish name day calendar, 1 of them as a main name, the first on 1 August.
The days Polish calendars list this name on. By custom you celebrate one of them, usually the first after your birthday.
Rarer dates. Only the most complete calendars add this name on these days. Most skip them, so hardly anyone celebrates then.
How many people are named Alfons
1 in 10382 men in Poland is named Alfons. 2,056 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #699 among male names.
Alfons as a middle name
Alfons is a first name for 2,056 men in Poland and a middle name for another 2,185, a 48/52 split, almost evenly. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 170th, between Jędrzej (2,269) and Adolf (2,153).
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#168 Martin2,286
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#169 Jędrzej2,269
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#170 Alfons2,185
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#171 Adolf2,153
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#172 Amadeusz2,150