Zhivko
A Slavic name from the root for "alive, living". Only a few dozen men in Poland carry it, all of them male, and no boys received it last year: most Poles have never met one.
Zhivko Pronunciation
What Zhivko means
Where Zhivko comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Zhivko grows from the Slavic root živ, meaning alive, living. The same root sits in Polish żywy and życie, so a Polish reader meets the sense of the name without translation. The Bulgarian spelling is Zhivko. Serbian and Croatian write it Živko, in Cyrillic Живко, and from it comes the very common surname Живковић, Živković.
Latin had its own word for the same idea. The name Vitalis, from vita, life, stands as its cousin across the language line. Zhivko does the Slavic version of that job. The short meaning, alive and living, is also the literal origin, with no later gloss attached.
The root spread into a small family of South Slavic names. Živojin keeps it plain. Živorad joins it to rad, willing, and Života leans on the same živ again. A boy named Zhivko therefore shares his first syllable with a whole shelf of neighbours.
Picture a school register in a Bulgarian classroom. The teacher reads Живко aloud, and the word for living answers to a raised hand. That is the plain fact the name records: someone alive.
How many people are named Zhivko
1 in 627829 men in Poland is named Zhivko. 34 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #6935 among male names.