Beka
Fewer than 900 Poles carry it, every one of them a man, and boys aren't being given it now: a name most people here have never met. Its recorded meaning is an odd one, "half", as in half a shekel.
Beka Pronunciation
Beka is pronounced BE-kah (/ˈbɛka/).
What Beka means
Where Beka comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
The name Beka grows from Slavic soil. In Slavic speech it lands as two short syllables, easy to call across a room and easy for a child to answer to.
The meaning most often tied to it comes from elsewhere. In the Book of Exodus the word beka names a weight, half a shekel, the sum each counted man paid at the sanctuary. That reading of "half, half a shekel" was fastened to the name later, drawn from Hebrew rather than from its Slavic beginning. So the sound and the sense arrive by separate roads.
Picture a school register in September. Beka sits there in plain letters, no diminutive attached, no variant crowding the margin.
The name asks for little. It keeps its Slavic origin and its borrowed gloss of "half a shekel" side by side, and it hands a child a name of two clear syllables.
How many people are named Beka
1 in 24564 men in Poland is named Beka. 869 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1014 among male names.