Dafna
From Greek, meaning "laurel", the leaf of victory. It's rare enough that most Poles have never met one: only about a hundred women carry it, and the name has all but stopped being given.
Dafna Pronunciation
Dafna is pronounced DAHF-nah (/ˈdafna/).
What Dafna means
Where Dafna comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
The name Dafna grows from the Greek word daphne, the laurel or bay tree. In the old Greek story, Daphne was a nymph who turned into a laurel to escape Apollo, and the tree kept her name. Hebrew borrowed the same word and made it a given name, דפנה, common in Jewish families. Its Polish meaning is plain: laur, wawrzyn.
Laurel was the plant of victory. Romans crowned their winners and poets with its leaves, which is where the word "laureate" comes from. A child called Dafna carries that green branch in her name, though the name points first to the plant, not to the prize.
In a Polish class register, Dafna would sit apart from the Zuzannas and Julias. It reads as foreign and clear at once. No Polish diminutive has fixed itself to the name, and no Dafcia sits in the calendar of imieniny.
So the meaning stays close to the root: laurel, the evergreen wawrzyn.
How many people are named Dafna
1 in 210690 women in Poland is named Dafna. 107 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3290 among female names.
Dafna as a middle name
Dafna is a first name for 107 women in Poland and a middle name for another 5, a 96/4 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 3553rd, between Cristiane (5) and Dafni (5).
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#3551 Cosima5
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#3552 Cristiane5
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#3553 Dafna5
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#3554 Dafni5
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#3555 Daina5