Żeljko
Only six men in Poland carry it, and none has been born here since 2000. Slavic at root, the name means wished-for, from a word for desire.
Żeljko Pronunciation
Żeljko is pronounced ZHELY-ko (/ˈʐɛljkɔ/).
What Żeljko means
Where Żeljko comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Željko begins in the South Slavic word želja, which means wish or desire. The old Slavic root *žel- runs through several languages for wanting and longing, and this name grows straight out of it. So Željko reads as the wished-for one. It is a masculine name that stands on its own, without the usual crowd of diminutives or variants.
The sense of wished-for sits close to the origin, not layered on afterward. A želja is a wish. Željko is the person that wish points at. That reading holds in Serbian and Croatian, where the name is most common today, and where the spelling keeps its ž and its j.
On a Polish class register the name keeps those Balkan marks, and a teacher reads it aloud once to be sure of it. A child called Željko carries a plain old word for longing. The meaning stays simple: wished-for.
How many people are named Żeljko
1 in 3557698 men in Poland is named Żeljko. 6 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #24743 among male names.