Polish2 syllablesPolish form of Luke
Meaning: man from Lucania; the evangelist's name.
Łukasz
| Origin | Polish form of Luke, from Greek Loukas |
|---|---|
| Meaning | Man from Lucania, the region of southern Italy; Loukas is normally taken as a short form of Latin Lucanus |
| Pronunciation | WOO-kash. The name does not begin with an l — Polish ł is an English w — and sz is sh |
| Polish spelling | Łukasz. Strip the bar for a web address and you get lukasz, which is also exactly how the name gets mispronounced |
| Popularity | Outside the current U.S. top 100; one of the most-given names in Poland through the 1980s and 1990s |
| Variants | Luke, Lucas, Lukas, Luca, Luc, Lukáš (Czech) |
| Nicknames | Łukaszek, Łuki, Łukasiek |
| Name day | 18 October, the feast of St Luke the Evangelist |
History & meaning
Luke wrote roughly a quarter of the New Testament — the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles — and Paul calls him "the beloved physician" in Colossians, which is why he is the patron of doctors. A later tradition made him a painter of the Virgin, so painters' guilds across medieval Europe took him as well. The name itself is more modest than the résumé: Greek Loukas is standardly explained as a clipped form of Loukanos, Latin Lucanus, "the man from Lucania". The connection people reach for instinctively, Latin lux "light", is folk etymology; the two words are unrelated, however neatly they would fit an evangelist.
The Polish form carries the single most useful lesson in the language. Ł is not an l. It is the w of "water", so Łukasz is WOO-kash and Łódź, the city, is roughly "woodge". This was not always true: until the twentieth century ł was a dark, velarised l, the sound at the end of English "full", and that older pronunciation survives now only in some eastern dialects and in recordings of pre-war actors. The w took over completely within a couple of generations. On the popularity charts Łukasz did something similar, going from unremarkable to inescapable — Polish schools in the 1990s were full of them — before easing back. Among Polish church names it is one of the few that sounds young.
Why parents choose it
It is warm, short, internationally legible once written Lukas, and it belongs to a saint nobody has an argument with. The trade is that the first letter will be wrong on every English-speaking tongue until corrected.
Middle names for Łukasz
The soft opening and the sh ending like a firm middle name between them: Łukasz Piotr, Łukasz Jan, Łukasz Marcin, Łukasz Dawid. Avoid a second name that also starts with a w sound. See the middle names guide.
Famous Łukaszes
Łukasz Górnicki rebuilt Castiglione's Book of the Courtier as a Polish original, Dworzanin polski, in 1566, and the result is a monument of Renaissance Polish prose. Łukasz Fabiański kept goal for Arsenal, Swansea and West Ham. Łukasz Kubot won the Wimbledon men's doubles title in 2017 with Marcelo Melo.
Consider instead
Luke is the same evangelist with one syllable and no diacritic. Lucas keeps two syllables and travels everywhere. Marek is the Polish name of the other short Gospel writer.