Petronela
Fewer than 400 Polish women carry it, and not one girl has been given it since 2000: a name most people here will never meet. At root it's Latin, from a word for rock or stone.
Petronela Pronunciation
Petronela is pronounced pet-ro-NE-lah (/pɛtrɔˈnɛla/).
What Petronela means
Where Petronela comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Petronela reaches back to Latin. The root is petr-, the word for rock, and it survives at the head of the name. Piotr, listed here as its variant, holds the same stone, and so does the diminutive Piotrek. All of them trace to skała and kamień.
The rock reading did not begin with Petronela herself. It came to her through Peter, the apostle whose Greek by-name meant stone, and the sense then settled on the whole family of forms. Latin handed it along without fuss.
In Poland her name-day falls on the 31st of May. A Petronela might hear it read from a class register that morning, or write it on a form at the urząd. The name means stone. And the diminutive Piotrek keeps that same stone.
When Petronela celebrates name day
Petronela appears 2 times in the Polish name day calendar, 1 of them as a main name, the first on 31 May.
The days Polish calendars list this name on. By custom you celebrate one of them, usually the first after your birthday.
Rarer dates. Only the most complete calendars add this name on these days. Most skip them, so hardly anyone celebrates then.
How many people are named Petronela
1 in 57805 women in Poland is named Petronela. 390 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1502 among female names.
Petronela as a middle name
Petronela is a first name for 390 women in Poland and a middle name for another 721, a 35/65 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 276th, between Filomena (733) and Maya (702).
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#274 Amalia743
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#275 Filomena733
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#276 Petronela721
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#277 Maya702
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#278 Isabella697