Skip to main content

Ilham

Arabic in root, from a word for "inspiration". It stays rare in Poland: only about 100 people carry it, mostly men, and no boy or girl was given it last year.

Ilham Pronunciation

Ilham is pronounced EEL-khahm (/ˈilxam/).

Alive in 2025
101
National rank
#3430

What Ilham means

Where Ilham comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.

Ilham comes from Arabic, from the word ilhām (إلهام), which names inspiration itself. In Arabic the term suggests something breathed in, a thought that arrives from outside the person who thinks it. That sense of arrival is the meaning the name still keeps, and in English it reads plainly as inspiration.

The name is at home across the Arabic-speaking world, and it passed into Turkish and Azerbaijani use, where the spelling İlham with a dotted capital is common. One documented bearer is İlham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan since 2003. On an official form at the urząd it needs no translation beside it.

The meaning stays close to the word. A Polish reader meets it as natchnienie, inspiracja. Ilham is, before anything else, a noun that means inspiration.

How many people are named Ilham

1 in 242570 men in Poland is named Ilham. 101 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3430 among male names.

People with the name Ilham 2019 → 2025
101 +89 since 2019
2020 15 +3
2021 22 +7
2022 38 +16
2023 58 +20
2024 86 +28
2025 101 +15

Ilham as a middle name

Ilham is a first name for 101 men in Poland and a middle name for another 7, a 94/6 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 3897th, between Ike (7) and Imad (7).

As a first name
101
As a middle name
7
first name 94% middle name 6%

Look up another name

Search the register, or step through the ranking one place at a time.