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 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, so a name whose raw count fell by a tenth actually held its ground, and counting babies would have called that a decline.

Lana has fallen furthest: 19.3 girls in every 1,000 at the start of the window against 9.6 now, down 50%. Petra is next, down 49%. Most of these names are still on the list and still perfectly familiar; what has changed is how many parents pick them.

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 girls behind it, or click a name in the legend to isolate it.

Together these 10 names went from 20.1% of girls born in 2017 to 10.3% in 2025: 1,632 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 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.

Lana lost the most places over the window, 23 of them, from #7 to #30. Compare that with Magdalena, which lost 9 places, from #30 to #39, on a share that is down 16%. The reverse case is just as common: a name can hold its position on the chart and still be given to far fewer girls, because everything around it is falling too. 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, 14 names dropped out of the top 50 for girls and 14 joined it. The names that left are Lorena, Katja, Tea, Katarina, Tia, Korina, Helena, Gabriela, Paula, Nina, Jana, Mihaela, Matea, Ivana. 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, from exactly the same source.

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 women and girls living in Croatia, from the 2021 census, and puts each one's position among newborns beside it.

Marija leads it: 94,012 people carry it, and among girls born in 2025 it ranked #16 with 189 births. 8 of the 12 do not appear on the newborn list at all. These are not obscure names. They are the names of Croatian mothers and grandmothers, and they are now given to fewer than 94 girls 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 men's names are interleaved with these. A high position there is a record of the 1960s and 1970s, not a statement about today.

The falling names are, on the whole, the names that were winning ten years ago. Several of them were in the top ten for girls when this window opens, which is the pattern worth understanding: on the girls' side the fastest way for a name to start falling is to have been extremely popular very recently.

That is a shorter cycle than boys' names run on. A boys' name that saturates tends to fade over a generation; a girls' name that saturates can be visibly out of favour within a decade, and the names replacing it are usually newer to Croatia rather than older. Set this list beside our fastest-rising girls' names and the exchange is legible: names with long domestic histories giving way to shorter, more international ones.

The catalogue detail bears that out. 2 of the 10 have a name day on the Croatian calendar and 5 carry a saint's or biblical association, against far fewer on the rising list. The average is 4.1 letters, from Ana to Lorena.

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 exaggerate the fall; hover any point for the raw number of girls 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 long histories 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 daughter will probably be the only one in her 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 she will actually be called. Check how it declines, which matters more for girls' names than most people expect: the vocative and genitive get used constantly, and a name that resists them will be quietly reshaped by everyone who uses it.

The one thing worth weighing is association. A name at the bottom of its cycle will read as your mother's generation to people your age and as new to your daughter'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.