Bożenna
Around 12,000 women in Poland carry it, all of them, yet not a single girl has been given it since 2000. A Slavic name meaning "gifted by god", it now belongs entirely to older generations.
Bożenna Pronunciation
Bożenna is pronounced bo-ZHEN-nah (/bɔˈʐɛnna/).
What Bożenna means
Where Bożenna comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Bożenna comes from Slavic roots, built on the old word for god. Its meaning is stated without decoration: gifted by god, or in Polish obdarowana przez boga. The doubled n marks it off from the plainer variant Bożena and from the affectionate diminutive Bożenka.
The name has a long life across the Slavic world. Božena Němcová, the nineteenth-century Czech writer, carried the shorter form and set it in front of readers throughout Central Europe. Centuries before her, a woman named Božena appears in Bohemian chronicles as the wife of Duke Oldřich. So the name reaches back well past living memory.
Picture a school register where Bożenna sits one line below a Bożena. Same origin, one extra letter. On her imieniny the spelling hardly matters, since both answer to the same idea of a child gifted by god.
How many people are named Bożenna
1 in 1866 women in Poland is named Bożenna. 12,082 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #340 among female names.
Bożenna as a middle name
Bożenna is a first name for 12,082 women in Poland and a middle name for another 4,116, a 75/25 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 154th, between Konstancja (4,218) and Andżelika (4,089).
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#152 Adela4,339
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#153 Konstancja4,218
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#154 Bożenna4,116
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#155 Andżelika4,089
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#156 Blanka4,054