Ilse
Fewer than sixty women in Poland carry it, so most Poles have never met one, and no girls have been given it this century. Germanic at root, from a name meaning "god is my oath".
Ilse Pronunciation
Ilse is pronounced EEL-se (/ˈilsɛ/).
What Ilse means
Where Ilse comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Ilse is a German shortening of Elisabeth, pared down over centuries into two plain syllables. The fuller name holds the meaning "god is my oath," and Ilse kept that sense when it broke away. By the nineteenth century it stood on German birth records alone, no longer a nickname. The name stands on its own.
The Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger (1921 to 2016) gave the name a place in literature. Her novel Die größere Hoffnung appeared in 1948 and drew on her own wartime years in Vienna.
On a Polish school register Ilse reads as a visitor from across the border, sitting near Elżbieta, which grows from the same old name. Both trace back to that single promise: god is my oath.
How many people are named Ilse
1 in 433535 women in Poland is named Ilse. 52 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #5204 among female names.
Ilse as a middle name
Ilse is a first name for 52 women in Poland and a middle name for another 29, a 64/36 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1307th, between Huyen (29) and Janeta (29).
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#1305 Henriette29
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#1306 Huyen29
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#1307 Ilse29
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#1308 Janeta29
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#1309 Janette29