The Fastest Rising Boys' Names in Croatia

One thing has to be clear before any of the numbers below mean anything. DZS publishes the 50 most frequent newborn names per sex per year, and nothing underneath. So when a name is missing from a year, it did not necessarily go unused. It finished below the cut, and the cut is lower than most people assume.

The measure here 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, and a name that held its raw count through that was quietly gaining ground.

Toma leads by a distance. It went from 12.6 to 24.6 boys in every 1,000, which is 2.0x as common, and 441 boys were given it in 2025. Liam follows, at least 1.8x as common, from a much smaller base.

In the chart each line is one name's share, year by year. A line that starts partway across is a name that was not on the list before that point. 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 5.5% of boys born in 2017 to 12.8% in 2025: 2,129 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 rose, so of course the combined line rises; the useful part is the size of it. One boy in eight now carries a name from this group, which is a real shift in where a cohort's names come from, not a rounding error at the bottom of the list.

The last column counts how many of the 10 were on the list at all in a given year, which is the honest way to read the early part of the curve: some of that climb is names becoming visible rather than names growing.

Rankings move for two completely different reasons. A name rises because more parents choose it, or because the names above it lose ground and it stands still while the field thins. Both look identical in a list of positions, and only one of them is a trend.

Toma gained the most places over the window, 27 of them, from #30 to #3. Compare that with Bruno, which climbed 11 places, from #42 to #31, on growth of 1.2x. Same chart, very different stories, which is why the ranking in this article is by share and the places gained sit in their own table beside the growth figure that explains them.

Between 2017 and 2025, 6 names joined the top 50 for boys and 6 dropped out of it. That is a modest turnover, and it is the quiet headline of this post: boys' naming in Croatia moves, but it moves slowly. The names arriving are Mauro, Liam, Maro, Oliver, Andrija, Duje. The most recent is Mauro, which first appeared in 2023.

Names on the right are not gone from Croatia. They are below the cut line, which as the table above shows is a low bar but a real one.

Put the 10 side by side and the pattern is not the one people expect. 6 of them carry a saint's or biblical association and 5 have a name day on the Croatian calendar, so a good half of this list is not new at all. These are old names being picked up again, often short forms that sound modern while carrying a saint behind them.

The rest of the movement is import. 7 of the 10 are names that travel, recognisable well outside Croatia, and 4 of the 10 were not on the list at the start of the window at all. That is the two-engine pattern in Croatian boys' names right now: a revival on one side, an arrival on the other, and very little in between.

They are also short. The average is 4.5 letters, from Teo to Viktor, with 6 of them at four letters or fewer. Short names have an advantage that has nothing to do with fashion: they survive being shouted across a playground, they rarely get misspelled abroad, and they do not need a nickname invented for them.

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 flatter or flatten it; hover any point for the raw number of boys behind it.

A rising name is a genuinely different bet from a top-ten name, and it is worth knowing which one you are making. A name on the way up is fresh now, which is exactly the appeal, but the trajectory that makes it feel current is the same trajectory that can make it feel dated later. Nobody can tell you where any of these names will be in ten years, and anyone who does is guessing.

What you can do is check the practical things while the name is still on your shortlist. Say it with the surname several times, out loud. Croatian surnames carry their own rhythm, and a first name ending on the sound the surname starts with will blur every single time. Say the nickname too, because that is the version he will actually be called.

Check how it travels if that matters to you. A name with č, ć, š, ž or đ is fine at home and will be flattened by foreign systems, so it is worth deciding now which stripped-down spelling you can live with. Check the name day as well, since about half of these have one and half do not.

Then be honest about how common you want it to be. There is no wrong answer. What you want to avoid is finding out by accident, which is the whole reason these numbers are here.

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. Aim for a name you are both actually excited about rather than one nobody objected to.