Camelia
A Latin name from the camellia flower. It barely registers in Poland: about 35 women carry it and no girls have been recorded with it since 2000, so most Poles will never meet one.
Camelia Pronunciation
Camelia is pronounced tsah-MEL-yah (/t͡saˈmɛlja/).
What Camelia means
Where Camelia comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Camelia grows straight out of Latin, from the name of a flower, the camellia. That flower has a traceable origin of its own. Carl Linnaeus named the genus Camellia in honour of Georg Joseph Kamel, a Moravian Jesuit and botanist who worked as a pharmacist and catalogued plants in the Philippines around 1700. His Latinized surname was Camellus. Hidden in the personal name, then, is the name of a real man who pressed leaves and drew specimens.
The short meaning stays close to the ground: camellia flower, and nothing more elaborate. The evergreen shrub blooms in winter, when little else does. A Polish reader meets the word most often on a florist's sign or in a garden catalogue.
Picture the school register on the first day. A teacher reads Camelia aloud, and the class hears a flower before it hears a girl. The name keeps that link. It began as a bloom named for a botanist, and it stays a bloom, the camellia.
How many people are named Camelia
1 in 644110 women in Poland is named Camelia. 35 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #6693 among female names.
Camelia as a middle name
Camelia is a first name for 35 women in Poland and a middle name for another 18, a 66/34 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1705th, between Balladyna (18) and Carlotta (18).
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#1703 Aura18
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#1704 Balladyna18
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#1705 Camelia18
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#1706 Carlotta18
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#1707 Carmel18