Klym
A Slavic name meaning gentle, or merciful. In Poland it belongs to Ukrainian families and stays rare: only about 120 men carry it, and no boys were given it here last year.
Klym Pronunciation
Klym is pronounced KLIHM (/klɨm/).
What Klym means
Where Klym comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Klym is the Ukrainian form of Kliment, a name that spread through Slavic lands with the early Christian church. The root sits in the Latin Clemens, which meant merciful and gentle, and that meaning traveled east with the name. In Ukrainian usage it shortened to Klym, plain and firm. Polish speakers hear the same sense in łagodny.
Saint Clement of Rome gave the name its long reach, and his cult carried Kliment into Kyiv and beyond. One documented bearer is Klym Polishchuk, a Ukrainian writer and poet born in 1891, whose stories drew on folk legend before Soviet repression ended his life in 1937. The name holds a real page in Ukrainian letters, beyond the church calendar.
A short name. On a Polish school register it would sit among longer Slavic entries without fuss. The meaning stays the same wherever it lands: łagodny, merciful and gentle.
How many people are named Klym
1 in 177885 men in Poland is named Klym. 120 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3073 among male names.