Gocha
A Greek-rooted variant of Małgorzata, meaning "pearl". Around 900 Polish men carry it, and these days almost no one is given it: a name most Poles have never met.
Gocha Pronunciation
Gocha is pronounced GO-khah (/ˈgɔxa/).
What Gocha means
Where Gocha comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Gocha reaches us through Małgorzata, and behind that longer name sits the Greek word margaritēs, meaning pearl. Modern Greek still calls a pearl margaritari, so the root has held. In Polish the sense survives as perła.
Gocha never appears on a birth certificate. It belongs to friends and family, the short name a woman registered as Małgorzata answers to every day. In a school register the teacher writes out the full Małgorzata, while the girl herself scrawls Gocha at the top of her notebook.
The name carries no saint of its own and no fixed imieniny; those belong to Małgorzata, and Gocha borrows them. What it keeps, under all the informality, is that first Greek meaning. Gocha is a pearl.
How many people are named Gocha
1 in 22855 men in Poland is named Gocha. 934 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #991 among male names.