Zulfiya
Fewer than three dozen women in Poland carry this name, so most Poles will never meet one. Its Arabic root points to a lock or curl of hair.
Zulfiya Pronunciation
Zulfiya is pronounced zoolf-YIH-ah (/zulfˈjɨa/).
What Zulfiya means
Where Zulfiya comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Zulfiya traces back to the Arabic word zulf, which names the curls and side-locks that fall beside the face. The short meaning stays close to that root: a lock of hair, loki włosów. The name traveled east with Islam and settled among Tatar, Uzbek, and Kazakh families, where it grew far more common than in Arabic-speaking lands.
Its most documented bearer is the Uzbek poet Zulfiya Isroilova, who lived from 1915 to 1996 and edited a women's magazine in Tashkent for decades. Her verse made the name known across Soviet Central Asia. Her name marks a literary prize today.
In Poland the name is rare and reads as foreign, a spelling a teacher might pause over in a class register. It has no Polish diminutive or variant of its own. What it offers is plain and physical: the curl of hair its Arabic root describes.
How many people are named Zulfiya
1 in 727220 women in Poland is named Zulfiya. 31 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #7416 among female names.