Yona
A Hebrew name meaning "dove". In Poland it stays rare, most people will never meet one, and it goes to women and men in near-equal measure.
Yona Pronunciation
Yona is pronounced ih-O-nah (/ɨˈɔna/).
What Yona means
Where Yona comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Yona comes from the Hebrew Yonah, written יוֹנָה, and means dove. In the Book of Jonah the same word names the prophet swallowed by a great fish and set back on dry land.
There is an older dove too. In Genesis, Noah releases one from the ark, and it returns with an olive leaf, a sign the flood has drained. From that reading the bird became a token of peace among Jewish readers and later Christian ones.
In Poland the name keeps close to its Jewish roots. On a school class register it is short, four letters, easy for a small child to write. Yona grew no Polish diminutive of its own. It holds the plain Hebrew form and the plain Hebrew meaning: dove, gołębica.
How many people are named Yona
1 in 867071 women in Poland is named Yona. 38 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #6410 among female names.
Yona as a middle name
Yona is a first name for 38 women in Poland and a middle name for another 17, a 69/31 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1811th, between Virginie (17) and Zelia (17).
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#1809 Thảo17
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#1810 Virginie17
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#1811 Yona17
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#1812 Zelia17
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#1813 Zyglinda17