Zenaida
Greek at root, marking a girl as "sacred to Zeus". Fewer than 400 Polish women carry it and none has been given in recent years, so most Poles have never met one.
Zenaida Pronunciation
Zenaida is pronounced ze-nah-EE-dah (/zɛnaˈida/).
What Zenaida means
Where Zenaida comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Zenaida comes from Greek, built on the name of Zeus. In the genitive, Zeus becomes Zenos, and that fragment sits at the front of Zenaida, which is why the name reads as sacred to Zeus. The same root fed related Greek forms such as Zenais.
History gives the name a real bearer. Saint Zenaida of Tarsus lived in the first century and worked as a physician, and the Eastern church remembers her on the eleventh of October. Her story kept the short meaning close to the etymology, sacred to Zeus, with no later gloss layered on top.
The name also traveled into science. Charles Lucien Bonaparte named a genus of American doves Zenaida after his wife Zénaïde, so the mourning dove now carries a form of it.
In a Polish class register Zenaida would sit oddly among the Zofias and Annas, an old Greek name among common ones. The Polish meaning stays plain: poświęcona Zeusowi.
When Zenaida celebrates name day
Zenaida appears 2 times in the Polish name day calendar, never as a main name. The first of these dates is 5 June.
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 Zenaida
1 in 58555 women in Poland is named Zenaida. 385 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1515 among female names.
Zenaida as a middle name
Zenaida is a first name for 385 women in Poland and a middle name for another 14, a 96/4 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 2044th, between Zaneta (14) and Żanet (14).
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#2042 Yana14
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#2043 Zaneta14
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#2044 Zenaida14
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#2045 Żanet14
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#2046 Adrienne13