Bertold
A Germanic name meaning "bright ruler". Fewer than 130 men in Poland carry it and no boys were named Bertold last year, so most Poles have never met one.
Bertold Pronunciation
Bertold is pronounced BER-tolt (/ˈbɛrtɔlt/).
What Bertold means
Where Bertold comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Bertold comes from Germanic roots, joining beraht, meaning bright, with wald, meaning rule. Put together they give the sense the name still holds: bright ruler. The German-speaking world kept it in steady use, and its close variant Berthold sits right beside it in the old records, one letter apart.
One bearer made it hard to forget. Berthold of Regensburg, a Franciscan friar of the thirteenth century, drew large crowds to his open-air sermons across the German lands. Centuries later the playwright Bertolt Brecht pulled the spelling toward Bertolt, and that form travelled further than the original.
In a Polish class register the name reads as foreign, and it is. It came with German settlers and stayed rare. Its day is barely marked on the imieniny calendar, which suits a name this uncommon.
Say what the old parts say. Bertold means a bright ruler, wspaniały władca in Polish.
When Bertold celebrates name day
Bertold appears 3 times in the Polish name day calendar, never as a main name. The first of these dates is 29 March.
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 Bertold
1 in 165474 men in Poland is named Bertold. 129 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #2933 among male names.
Bertold as a middle name
Bertold is a first name for 129 men in Poland and a middle name for another 61, a 68/32 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 936th, between Berk (61) and Charlie (61).
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#934 Austin61
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#935 Berk61
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#936 Bertold61
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#937 Charlie61
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#938 Ferdinand61