Żanna
Fewer than 400 women in Poland carry it, so meeting one stays memorable, and no girls were given it last year. From Hebrew, it means "God is gracious".
Żanna Pronunciation
Żanna is pronounced ZHAHN-nah (/ˈʐanna/).
What Żanna means
Where Żanna comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Żanna comes to Polish through Russian and Ukrainian, where Zhanna has long been a familiar first name. Trace the root back far enough and it is Hebrew: Yochanan, meaning "God is gracious." The same source gives us Jan, Joanna, and the French Jeanne, so Żanna sits among a large family of relatives.
The short meaning, "God is gracious," stays inside the name even when no one stops to think about it. In Polish that reads bóg jest łaskawy. A girl named Żanna holds a small theological claim she never has to defend.
The variant Zhanna keeps the Eastern spelling visible, and you still meet it on paperwork, in a school register, at an urząd counter where the clerk checks whether it is ż or zh. That double life, a Polish spelling over an Eastern form, is part of what the name means today.
Żanna stays rare here. It reads as faintly foreign and faintly elegant. And underneath the spelling it still says, plainly, that God is gracious.
How many people are named Żanna
1 in 63864 women in Poland is named Żanna. 353 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1598 among female names.
Żanna as a middle name
Żanna is a first name for 353 women in Poland and a middle name for another 54, an 87/13 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 934th, between Szczęsna (54) and Dagny (53).
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#932 Syntia54
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#933 Szczęsna54
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#934 Żanna54
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#935 Dagny53
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#936 Edwina53