Pankaj
The name means "lotus". Fewer than a hundred men in Poland carry it, and not one newborn has received it in the last twenty-five years: most Poles have never met a Pankaj.
Pankaj Pronunciation
Pankaj is pronounced PAHN-kahy (/ˈpankaj/).
What Pankaj means
Where Pankaj comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Pankaj is a Sanskrit name. It joins two small pieces, panka, meaning mud, and ja, meaning born. Put together they describe something born from mud, and that something is the lotus. The short meaning most people meet is simpler. Lotus, the flower.
The lotus roots in silt and opens above the water, which is why the old word tied the plant to the ground it rises from. A boy called Pankaj holds that flower in his name with none of the botany showing.
On a Polish class register the name would sit among Kacper and Szymon, foreign in its consonants, easy to say once you hear it. Poland gives it no name-day and no Polish diminutive, so Pankaj stays whole from the register to the last official form.
For Polish parents the appeal is plain. A short male name with one clear meaning: lotus, the flower born from mud.
How many people are named Pankaj
1 in 254121 men in Poland is named Pankaj. 84 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3870 among male names.
Pankaj as a middle name
Pankaj is a first name for 84 men in Poland and a middle name for another 17, an 83/17 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 2250th, between Okan (17) and Quân (17).
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#2248 Octavio17
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#2249 Okan17
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#2250 Pankaj17
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#2251 Quân17
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#2252 Raffael17