Zulfiia
An Arabic name meaning "lock of hair". Only about 55 women in Poland carry it, and no girls have been given it in years, so most Poles have never met one.
Zulfiia Pronunciation
Zulfiia is pronounced ZOOLFY-yah (/ˈzulfjja/).
What Zulfiia means
Where Zulfiia comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
The name Zulfiia grows from the Arabic word zulf, the curl or side-lock of hair that falls beside the face. From that root comes its short meaning in Polish, lok włosów, a lock of hair. The origin sits outside any single European line, and Arabic gives the name its coloring across Tatar, Bashkir, and Central Asian communities.
It traveled well. One bearer makes the name checkable: Zulfiya Isroilova, the Uzbek poet born in 1915, who published under the single name Zulfiya and won wide readership across the Soviet-era Turkic world. Her fame kept the name in circulation for generations of girls.
A Polish clerk at the urząd, filling a form, meets Zulfiia as a foreign guest rather than a local variant. Poland offers no diminutive of its own for it, no Zula or Fila fixed by custom. The name stays close to the shape it arrived in.
The meaning stays close to the body. A lock of hair.
How many people are named Zulfiia
1 in 409888 women in Poland is named Zulfiia. 55 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #5050 among female names.