Nikołaj
A spelling of Mikołaj, from the Greek for "victory of the people". Fewer than a hundred men in Poland carry it this way, so most Poles have never met one.
Nikołaj Pronunciation
Nikołaj is pronounced nyee-KO-wahy (/ɲiˈkɔwaj/).
What Nikołaj means
Where Nikołaj comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Nikołaj begins in Greek, in the name Nikolaos. Two parts hold it up. First `nikē`, victory. Then `laos`, the people. Read together they give victory of the people, `zwycięstwo ludu`, a name about the crowd rather than one commander.
In Polish ears the form sounds eastern. Nikołaj is the Russian spelling of a saint Poland already knew as Mikołaj, the fourth-century bishop of Myra. The two names share one origin and one feast in early December.
Mikołaj stayed the household variant, the bishop who became Święty Mikołaj on the sixth. Nikołaj keeps the harder consonants of the border. On a school register it can mark a family with kin to the east. What both spellings still report is the old Greek sum, victory of the people.
How many people are named Nikołaj
1 in 229529 men in Poland is named Nikołaj. 93 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3615 among male names.
Nikołaj as a middle name
Nikołaj is a first name for 93 men in Poland and a middle name for another 9, a 91/9 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 3370th, between Nikolay (9) and Nnaemeka (9).
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#3368 Nicodem9
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#3369 Nikolay9
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#3370 Nikołaj9
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#3371 Nnaemeka9
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#3372 Nuri̇9