CzechPolishGreek root
Meaning: friend of horses.
Filip
| Origin | The Czech and Polish form of Greek Philippos, through Latin Philippus |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Lover of horses, from philos (loving, dear) + hippos (horse) |
| Pronunciation | FIH-lip. Both vowels are short and clean, the stress is on the first syllable, and there is no ph — Slavic languages spell the sound f |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100. In Czechia it has sat in the top ten for two decades, and it is common in Poland, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Sweden and Norway |
| Variants | Philip and Phillip (English), Felipe, Filippo, Filipe, Fülöp (Hungarian), Filips (Latvian) |
| Nicknames | Fíla, Filípek in Czech; Filipek and Fil in Polish |
| In the ancient world | Philip II of Macedon gave his name to the city of Philippi, which is why one of Paul's letters is addressed to the Philippians |
History & meaning
Greek names often say what a family owned. Hippos is a horse, and horses in archaic Greece meant land and rank, so the horse names — Philippos, Hippokrates, Xanthippos — marked the class that could afford to keep them. Philippos is the friend or lover of horses, and it belonged first to aristocrats and then to a king: Philip II of Macedon, who between 359 and 336 BC built the army and the treasury his son Alexander spent. The New Testament has two men of the name, the apostle and the deacon known as Philip the Evangelist, and they are routinely confused with one another.
Latin Philippus passed into every Slavic language as Filip, since neither Czech nor Polish has any use for the digraph ph. It stayed in steady if unspectacular use through the Middle Ages, attached to the apostle rather than the king, and then rose sharply in the 1990s. It has been a Czech top-ten fixture ever since, and it does the same work in Scandinavia and the western Balkans, where the spelling is identical. Very few names on this site are simultaneously this international and this unaltered; compare the English Philip, which has drifted much further from the Greek.
Why parents choose it
No accents, no clusters, no explanation required at a foreign border. Filip gives a Czech or Polish family a name that is fully native at home and fully readable abroad, which is a rarer combination than it sounds, and it shortens to Fíla without going childish.
Middle names for Filip
Two even syllables leave room for something longer: Filip Ondřej, Filip Matyáš, Filip Vojtěch, Filip Jan. The middle names guide works through the rhythm.
Famous Filips
Filip Topol was playing piano and singing his own songs with Psí vojáci in the Prague underground before he was sixteen, and remained one of the country's most uncompromising songwriters until his death in 2013. Filip Chytil has played in the NHL since 2017. Filip Bajon, the Polish director and novelist, has been a fixture of Polish cinema since the 1970s.
Consider instead
Philip is the same Greek name in English dress. Jakub matches it for popularity in both Czechia and Poland and has a biblical patriarch behind it. Marek is the shorter, blunter option in the same register. See them together on the Czech names page.