Zdzisława
About 25,000 Polish women carry it, but the name has stopped passing to new girls: no newborns in recent years. Slavic at root, built from the parts meaning "to attain glory," and now uncommon enough that meeting a young one would be a surprise.
Zdzisława Pronunciation
Zdzisława is pronounced zjees-WAH-vah (/zd͡ʑisˈwava/).
What Zdzisława means
Where Zdzisława comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Zdzisława grows from Slavic roots. The old verb behind it, zdziać, meant to do or to make, and it joins with sława, the word for glory. Put together, the name reads as to attain glory, or in Polish, zdobywa sławę. Its masculine variant is Zdzisław, and the two have shared a family for a long time.
That reading, to attain glory, sounds more like a promise than a plain fact of birth. A girl called Zdzisława carried a whole sentence in her name. One bearer made the promise literal: Zdzisława Sośnicka, a Polish singer born in 1945, whose voice filled radio broadcasts for decades.
The name feels older now. It turns up more among grandmothers than newborns, and read out from a class register it dates the room. Yet the diminutive Zdzisia softens it, and the name day still comes round each year for every Zdzisława and Zdzisław.
How many people are named Zdzisława
1 in 914 women in Poland is named Zdzisława. 24,654 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #256 among female names.
Zdzisława as a middle name
Zdzisława is a first name for 24,654 women in Poland and a middle name for another 14,646, a 63/37 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 95th, between Anastazja (16,036) and Klara (13,639).
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#93 Olga16,119
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#94 Anastazja16,036
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#95 Zdzisława14,646
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#96 Klara13,639
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#97 Leokadia13,473