The Croatian Boys' Names Falling Out of Fashion

This needs saying before any of the numbers below, because it is the thing everyone gets wrong. DZS publishes the 50 most frequent newborn names per sex per year, and nothing underneath. A name that vanishes from the list has not vanished from Croatia. It has fallen below the cut, and the cut is far lower than people assume.

The measure is share: how many of every 1,000 boys born got the name, averaged over 2017 to 2019 at one end and 2023 to 2025 at the other. Share rather than headcount, because the cohort itself shrank. There were 16,659 boys born in 2025 against nearly nineteen thousand in 2017, so a name whose raw count fell by a tenth actually held its ground, and counting babies would have called that a decline.

Patrik has fallen furthest: 10.6 boys in every 1,000 at the start of the window against 4.8 now, down 55% or more. Filip is next, down 45%. Of the 10, 3 have dropped off the published list altogether.

In the chart each line is one name's share, year by year. A line that stops partway across is a name that fell below the cut line, not one that stopped being given. Hover any year for the exact figure and the number of boys behind it, or click a name in the legend to isolate it.

Together these 10 names went from 16.8% of boys born in 2017 to 7.8% in 2025: 1,299 of the 16,659 boys born that year. Worth being upfront about what that does and does not show. These names were selected because they fell, so of course the combined line falls; the useful part is the size of the block that moved.

The last column counts how many of the 10 were still on the list in a given year. Where that number drops, part of the fall in the line is a name going below the cut rather than a name going to zero.

Rankings move for two completely different reasons. A name slides because fewer parents choose it, or because the names below it gain ground and it drops while standing still. Both look identical in a list of positions, and only one of them is a decline.

Filip lost the most places over the window, 21 of them, from #7 to #28. Compare that with Dominik, which lost 13 places, from #29 to #42, on a share that is down 28%. That is why the ranking in this article is by share, and the places lost sit in their own table beside the figure that explains them.

Between 2017 and 2025, 6 names dropped out of the top 50 for boys and 6 joined it. The names that left are Patrik, Antonio, Andrej, Gabrijel, Martin, Stjepan. That is a modest turnover: boys' naming in Croatia moves, but it moves slowly, and most of the decline in this article is names sinking within the list rather than falling off it.

Again, a name on the left has not disappeared. It is below the cut line, which as the table above shows is a low bar but a real one.

This is the clearest way to see what a generation of naming does. The table below takes the 12 names carried by the most men and boys living in Croatia, from the 2021 census, and puts each one's position among newborns beside it.

Ivan leads it: 106,657 people carry it, more than any other name in the country, and it ranked #6 among boys born in 2025 with 375 births. 5 of the 12 do not appear on the newborn list at all. These are not obscure names. They are the names of Croatian fathers and grandfathers, and they are now given to fewer than 72 boys a year each.

The rank by living bearers is calculated across every name in our catalogue, both sexes together, which is why the numbering skips: the most carried women's names are interleaved with these. A high position there is a record of the 1960s and 1970s, not a statement about today.

Line the 10 up and the pattern is the mirror image of the rising list. 10 of them carry a saint's or biblical association and 10 have a name day on the Croatian calendar. Being an old, established, saint-backed Croatian name is no protection at all; if anything it is the profile of a name at risk, because those names were already saturated.

That is the mechanism worth understanding. A name that is everywhere in one generation gets skipped by the next, precisely because it is everywhere: parents naming a son after a grandfather are choosing against four boys in his class who share it. The names falling here are mostly not unfashionable. They are simply used up for now.

They are also longer than the risers. The average is 5.5 letters, from Ivan to Antonio, with 1 of them at four letters or fewer. The names replacing them run shorter, which is a real and consistent difference between the two lists.

Here is each name, what it means, where it comes from, and exactly how its share moved. The chart on each card plots births per 1,000 boys born, so the shrinking cohort cannot exaggerate the fall; hover any point for the raw number of boys behind it.

No, and this is worth saying plainly. A falling name is not a bad name, and nothing in this article should be read as a warning. Most of these are names with centuries behind them that happen to be at a low point in a cycle, and a name at a low point has one property parents often want: your son will probably be the only one in his class with it, while everyone still knows how to spell and pronounce it.

That combination is rare. A genuinely unusual name gets misheard and misspelled for life; a top-ten name gets shared with a classmate. A name that was everywhere thirty years ago and is quiet now sits between the two, which is why names come back at all.

The practical checks are the same as for any name. Say it with the surname several times, out loud, and say the nickname too, because that is the version he will actually be called. Decide how you feel about diacritics travelling, since foreign systems will flatten č, ć, š, ž and đ. Check the name day if that matters in your family; most of these names have one.

The one thing worth weighing is association. A name at the bottom of its cycle will read as your father's generation to people your age and as new to your son's classmates, and only you can judge how that lands in your family.

And do not do this alone. The fastest way through it is for each of you to go through the names separately, writing down anything that appeals without having to justify it, and only then compare the two lists. The names on both are your real shortlist, and they surface far faster than they would in a conversation.