Šelja
surname · Latin script
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 2 countries · latest register: DZS, 2021
Šelja is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Finland than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Borrowed from Russian зе́лье (zélʹje, “potion; (archaic) plant”), so named because elder has (traditionally) been used as a medicinal plant.
- FIFinland1 in 159K(measured from records)
- HRCroatia1 in 169K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Finland (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 8 (measured from records)
- 1 in 159K (inferred from the name graph)
35 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Selja in US United States.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Borrowed from Russian зе́лье (zélʹje, “potion; (archaic) plant”), so named because elder has (traditionally) been used as a medicinal plant.
Cited for this meaning 2
Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Šelja counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | 35 | 1 in 159K | 1.1K | — | 1 |
| HR Croatia | 25 | 1 in 169K | 25 | Šelja | 8 |
| US United States | — | — | listed | Selja | 2 |
| NO Norway | — | — | 190 | — | 1 |
| XK Kosovo | — | — | 25 | — | 1 |
35 people counted by DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); ASK Kosovo — Kërko Emrin (Name Search). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Evidence
(measured from records)3 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 2 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HR Croatia | DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form) | 2021 | 25 | #20,532 |
| HR Croatia | DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021) | 2021 | 24 | — |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Šelja mean, and where does it come from?
- Borrowed from Russian зе́лье (zélʹje, “potion; (archaic) plant”), so named because elder has (traditionally) been used as a medicinal plant. Recorded by Wiktionary and Nordic Names.
- In which country does Šelja have the most bearers?
- In Finland, the national register counted about 35 people named Šelja, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Šelja most common?
- Šelja is densest in Finland, where the national register counts about 1 in 159 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Šelja?
- In Finland, the national register counted 35 people named Šelja, about 1 in 159 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Šelja?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/%C5%A1eljaThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Šelja”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.