Sylwin
From Latin, meaning "of the forest". Just 88 men in Poland carry it, and it keeps fading: no boys have been given the name in years, so most Poles will never meet one.
Sylwin Pronunciation
Sylwin is pronounced SIHL-veen (/ˈsɨlvin/).
What Sylwin means
Where Sylwin comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Sylwin grows from the Latin word silva, meaning forest. The same root feeds the far more common Sylwester and Sylwia, so a boy named Sylwin already has relatives on any Polish street. From that root comes the plain sense the name carries: of the forest, leśny in Polish.
The Romans kept a god named Silvanus, a guardian of woods and the boundaries of cultivated land. He watched over field edges and grazing herds, a rustic figure at the margin of the farm. A child called Sylwin stands near that old idea of the woods without any of the ritual attached.
The name is short and easy to say.
There is a cross-gender partner too, Sylwina, built from the same forest root and worn by girls. Picture a school register where a Sylwin is listed a few lines above a Sylwester. Different endings, one origin. Both go back to silva, and both keep the meaning close: of the forest.
When Sylwin celebrates name day
Sylwin appears 3 times in the Polish name day calendar, never as a main name. The first of these dates is 17 February.
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 Sylwin
1 in 242570 men in Poland is named Sylwin. 88 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #3761 among male names.
Sylwin as a middle name
Sylwin is a first name for 88 men in Poland and a middle name for another 65, a 58/42 split, almost evenly. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 901st, between Oton (65) and Yan (65).
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#899 Luc65
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#900 Oton65
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#901 Sylwin65
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#902 Yan65
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#903 Alp64