Irit
A Hebrew name meaning "asphodel", a pale wild flower. In Poland it barely registers: fewer than a hundred women carry it, and most Poles will never meet one.
Irit Pronunciation
Irit is pronounced EE-reet (/ˈirit/).
What Irit means
Where Irit comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Irit comes from the Hebrew עירית, the name of the asphodel that grows across the hills of Israel. The flower is pale and hardy, at home on dry ground. Modern Hebrew took the plant's name and handed it to daughters, mostly from the twentieth century onward. The word is old. The given name is young.
Asphodel is not a garden showpiece. It holds where little else will, on stony slopes under a hard sun. A girl named Irit shares her name with that plant, and with nothing borrowed from another language, since the meaning sits right there in the Hebrew.
In Poland the name is rare, and Jewish. On a class register in Warsaw an Irit would stand out among the Zuzannas and Julias. There is no Polish diminutive for it, no softened school-yard form. The name has no name-day in the Polish calendar. It stays as it arrived, four letters naming one flower: the asphodel.
How many people are named Irit
1 in 278319 women in Poland is named Irit. 81 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3936 among female names.
Irit as a middle name
Irit is a first name for 81 women in Poland and a middle name for another 3, a 96/4 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 4877th, between Iria (3) and Irmtraut (3).
-
#4875 Io3
-
#4876 Iria3
-
#4877 Irit3
-
#4878 Irmtraut3
-
#4879 Iselin3