Zbigniew

given name · Polish · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Zbigniew is a given name, with more bearers in Poland than in any other country, where it is the 45th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Polish and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Slavonic; to get rid of anger; common Polish name.

rarermore common
  • PLPoland1 in 153
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 59K
  • CZCzechia1 in 68K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈255K

across 10 countries

Sources
224

63K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 153

Poland

Meaning & origin

Slavonic; to get rid of anger; common Polish name.

Sources 1

  • Baby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Zbigniew is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
PL Poland#45249,85238K rec.1 in 153256KZbigniew193
GB United Kingdom3,5162.4K rec.Zbigniew95
US United States3,13220K rec.1 in 106K3.1KZbigniew224
CZ Czechia#9561,37756 rec.162Zbigniew32
SE Sweden97762 rec.1 in 10K977Zbigniew23
NO Norway826312 rec.1 in 6.6K2.4KZbigniew22
CA Canada589513 rec.Zbigniew55
IS Iceland2301 in 1.5K230
DK Denmark2190 rec.1 in 27K2191
IT Italy195183 rec.Zbigniew28
BE Belgium187148 rec.Zbigniew25
SK Slovakia1723 rec.Zbigniew15

Roughly 250K people in Poland bear this name (about 1 in 153). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages

  • Polish1.4M97%
  • English20K1%
  • German5.3K1%
  • French2.8K1%
  • Norwegian Bokmål2.4K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Polish1,370,75697%
English19,9891%
German5,2921%
French2,7571%
Norwegian Bokmål2,4401%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way

Zbigniew is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French given name7.7K records spelled Zbigniew7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Spain, Argentina

    Languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Zbigniéw, Zbigñiew

  • German given name6.1K records spelled Zbigniew2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Germany, Austria, United States, United Kingdom

    Also written Zbigníew

  • Russian given name395 records spelled Zbigniew15 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Ukraine, Russia, United States, Kazakhstan

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian

    Also written Збигнев, Збігнєв, Zbignev, Збигнёв, Збіґнєв

  • Croatian given name201 records spelled Zbigniew9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Croatia, United Kingdom

    Languages: Croatian, Bulgarian, Serbian

    Also written Zbignjev, Збигњев

45 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses

Zbigniew is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Polish, a male given name of Slavic origin.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Swedish, Zbigniew är ett polskt namn, sammansatt av två namnelement som betyder ’bli av med’ respektive ’vrede’.

    as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon

  • To Get Rid Of Anger

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • Common Polish name, from an old Slavonic personal name composed of the elements zbit to get rid of + gniew anger. Cognate: Czech: Zbyhn v. Feminine form: Czech: Zbyhn va. Pet forms: Czech: Zby a m, f; Zbyn k, Zbys k m; Zbyhn (u )ka, Zby a f .

    as a word

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Over time

0204060196019701980199051 · 1972

Show as table
Zbigniew in SSB — Navn (1880–present), Norway, 1953–1993
Yearrecords
19539
195417
195519
195617
195721
195823
195933
196042
196138
196228
196341
196432
196531
196637
196749
196836
196942
197034
197134
197251
197334
197424
197522
197630
197718
197832
197922
198019
198112
198214
198311
198413
19856
198611
19876
19934

NO SSB — Navn (1880–present)36 years between 1953–1993. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name

100012001400160018002000Zbigniew of Poland, b. 1070Zbigniew Herbert, b. 1924Zbigniew Brzezinski, b. 1928Zbigniew Rybczyński, b. 1949Zbigniew Preisner, b. 1955Zbigniew Rau, b. 1955Zbigniew Boniek, b. 1956Zbigniew Zamachowski, b. 1961Zbigniew Ziobro, b. 1970Zbigniew Bródka, b. 1984

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

Evidence

Attested in 34 sources across 18 countries.

Official registers attesting Zbigniew
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)256K#22
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20)2026250K#23
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20203.1K#5,469
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)2.4K#946
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)1.1K#1,412
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)977#1,721
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2015957
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2014949
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2013930
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2016923
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2017920
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2021919

Reference works 3

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 227 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Zbigniew?
We estimate roughly 255 thousand people bear Zbigniew (counting its spellings and scripts) across 10 countries in our records.
In which country does Zbigniew have the most bearers?
We estimate about 250 thousand people bear Zbigniew in Poland, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled zbigniew.
Where is Zbigniew most common?
Zbigniew is densest in Poland, where the national register counts about 1 in 153 people carrying it.
How common is Zbigniew compared with other names?
In Poland, Zbigniew is the 45th most common given name of 66,904 given names recorded there.
Is Zbigniew a male or female name?
Zbigniew is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Zbigniew mean?
Recorded meaning: Slavonic; to get rid of anger; common Polish name.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/zbigniew

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Zbigniew” — the 45th most common given name in Poland. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Zbigniew parses inside a full name →