Bela
Fewer than a hundred people in Poland carry it, most of them women, and no girls were given it last year. The root is Slavic, with the plain meaning "white".
Bela Pronunciation
Bela is pronounced BE-lah (/ˈbɛla/).
What Bela means
Where Bela comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Bela grows from the Slavic root běl, meaning white. The same root gives Polish biały, and it names brightness in place after place. Beograd, the city Poles call Belgrad, is literally the white city. Bela keeps that colour and little else.
In Poland the fuller forms do most of the work. Izabela and Izabella fill the registers, Iza serves as the everyday diminutive, and Izabel turns up as a slimmer variant. Bela sits beside them. It is short enough to read as the plain word for white.
On a class register the name takes four letters and no more. The colour is white. That is where Bela starts. Read it, and the sense is already there, the old Slavic běl.
How many people are named Bela
1 in 262138 women in Poland is named Bela. 96 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3534 among female names.
Bela as a middle name
Bela is a first name for 96 women in Poland and a middle name for another 19, an 83/17 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1655th, between Ayşe (19) and Birgitta (19).
-
#1653 Avery19
-
#1654 Ayşe19
-
#1655 Bela19
-
#1656 Birgitta19
-
#1657 Bonifacja19