Mina
Four letters, two pasts: a Latin mina that weighed silver in ancient markets, and a Persian mina, the deep blue enamel glazing mosque tiles. In Poland it goes to both girls and boys, though most people here have never met one: barely 200 carry it.
Mina Pronunciation
Mina is pronounced MEE-nah (/ˈmina/).
What Mina means
Where Mina comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
The name Mina reaches back to Latin, where mina named a unit of weight and a coin used across the ancient Mediterranean. Rome took the word from Greek mna, and the Greeks in turn had it from older Semitic trade. The word traveled far. Long before it settled onto any child, it counted silver and balanced scales in the marketplaces of antiquity.
Its short meaning, azure and blue enamel, comes from a different source entirely: Persian mina, the glaze that colors mosque tiles and painted bowls a deep, luminous blue. That sense of blue enamel attached to the name later, drawn from Persian rather than from the Latin measure. Two histories meet in four letters.
Mina has no standard diminutive and no cross-gender pair. It arrives finished. On a Polish class register it fits in a single short line, needing nothing added or trimmed. What a bearer keeps, then, is a name that once meant a weight of silver and now points toward Persian blue enamel.
How many people are named Mina
1 in 150292 women in Poland is named Mina. 209 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #2168 among female names.
Mina's popularity over time
Fewer than 2 girls were given the name in 2025. It has been stable for a decade.
Mina as a middle name
Mina is a first name for 209 women in Poland and a middle name for another 48, an 81/19 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 994th, between Leonor (48) and Ngọc (48).
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#992 India48
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#993 Leonor48
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#994 Mina48
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#995 Ngọc48
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#996 Solange48