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 girls 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 15,820 girls born in 2025 against nearly eighteen thousand in 2017, and a name that held its raw count through that was quietly gaining ground.

Una leads. It went from 6.3 to 10.7 girls in every 1,000, which is 1.7x as common, and 185 girls were given it in 2025. Sofia is right behind, at least 1.7x as common, and it was not even on the list when the window opened.

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, and on this chart there are a lot of them. Hover any year for the exact figure and the number of girls behind it, or click a name in the legend to isolate it.

Together these 10 names went from 3% of girls born in 2017 to 10% in 2025: 1,588 of the 15,820 girls 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 girl in ten now carries a name from this group, and most of that group was invisible at the start of the window.

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.

Una gained the most places over the window, 30 of them, from #47 to #17. Compare that with Tena, which climbed 11 places, from #22 to #11, on growth of 1.0x. It is the same chart and two completely different stories: one name was chosen by more parents, the other simply outlasted the names above it. That 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, 14 names joined the top 50 for girls and 14 dropped out of it. That is more than a quarter of the list replaced in eight years, and more than twice the turnover on the boys' side over exactly the same period. If you have had the feeling that girls' names are changing faster, this is the number behind it. The names arriving are Kaja, Dunja, Luce, Lora, Cvita, Aria, Maris, Sofija, Aurora, Emili, Iris, Kiara, Lota, Sofia. The most recent is Kaja, which first appeared in 2025.

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 first thing that stands out is what is missing. Name days: 1 of the 10 has one on the Croatian calendar, and 2 carry a saint's or biblical association. On the boys' side those figures are roughly half the list. Whatever is driving girls' names right now, it is not the church calendar.

What is driving it is sound and reach. 5 of the 10 are internationally recognisable, and 6 of them were not on the Croatian list at all when the window opened. Alongside them sit 2 names that are distinctly Croatian or Slavic, several of them Dalmatian forms that had all but disappeared from the national list. Import on one side, coastal revival on the other.

They are also short and vowel-heavy. The average is 4.5 letters, from Una to Sofija, with 5 of them at four letters or fewer, and almost all of them end in -a. That is a real constraint rather than a coincidence: a Croatian girls' name is expected to decline like one, and the names that spread fastest are the ones that already fit the grammar.

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 girls born, so the shrinking cohort cannot flatter or flatten it; hover any point for the raw number of girls 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 she will actually be called.

Check how the name declines. This matters more for girls' names than most people expect: the vocative and the genitive get used constantly, and a name that resists them will be quietly reshaped by everyone who uses it. Check how it travels as well, since a name with č, ć, š, ž or đ will be flattened by foreign systems, and it is worth deciding now which stripped-down spelling you can live with.

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.