Unai
At root it means shepherd, a cowherd or keeper of the flock. In Poland the name is a true rarity: fewer than twenty men carry it, all of them male, and no boys have been given it in recent years.
Unai Pronunciation
Unai is pronounced oo-NAH-ee (/uˈnai/).
What Unai means
Where Unai comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Unai comes from Basque, the language of the western Pyrenees that belongs to no wider family. In Basque, unai means cowherd, the person who walks behind the cattle. Polish renders it pasterz, a herder of animals on open ground.
The word sat in daily Basque speech long before it stood on a birth certificate. Basque parents began registering Unai as a given name in the later twentieth century, part of a wider return to native forms. It has no diminutive and no feminine variant. The name stays as it is, four letters, two syllables.
Spanish records now list Unai across the Basque Country and beyond. A boy named Unai reads his name in a school register between Spanish and Latin forms, and it holds its own. The meaning stays close to the surface: a cowherd, a shepherd, pasterz.
How many people are named Unai
1 in 1423079 men in Poland is named Unai. 15 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #12372 among male names.