Hajek
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Czech (Hajek); 1. occupational name for a woodman or topographic name for someone who lived by a thicket or grove, from Czech hajek ‘thicket’, from hdj ‘grove’, or directly from hdj ‘grove’, the dimin
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈhaɪɛk/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Hajek is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Czechia than in any other country, where it is the 23rd most common surname.
- CZCzechia1 in 1K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 157K
- SKSlovakia1 in 12K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Czechia (measured from records)
- Sources
- 89 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.0K (inferred from the name graph)
10,203 people
Highest-authority source
Czechia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Hájek in CZ Czechia, SK Slovakia.
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)
Czech (Hajek); 1. occupational name for a woodman or topographic name for someone who lived by a thicket or grove, from Czech hajek ‘thicket’, from hdj ‘grove’, or directly from hdj ‘grove’, the diminutive suffix -ek being added in forming the surname. 2. occupational name for a keeper of animals (a herd), especially one who looked after horses (an ostler), from hdjit ‘to protect’, ‘to defend’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 12 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hajek 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CZ Czechia | #23 | 10,203 | 1 in 1K | 10K | Hájek | 89 |
| US United States | — | 2,119 | 1 in 157K | 2.2K | Hajek | 86 |
| SK Slovakia | #726 | 444 | 1 in 12K | 444 | Hájek | 27 |
| PL Poland | — | 253 | 1 in 151K | 132 | Hajek | 32 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 174K | — | Hajek | 26 |
| HR Croatia | — | 89 | 1 in 48K | 89 | — | — |
| CU Cuba | — | ≈71 est. | ≈1 in 155K | — | Hajek | 2 |
10,203 people counted by MVČR — living population register 2017. 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: MVČR — living population register 2017; naše jména — 2016 MVČR snapshot; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; JÚĽŠ SAV — Databáza priezvisk na Slovensku (surname database, 1995 census); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form). 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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Hajek is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Russian, var of Gaiek.
as a wordA Dictionary of Period Russian Names (Wickenden / Goldschmidt 1996)
In poz-cet-pro, smell, sniff, kiss
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Peter Hajekb. 1941ATAustrian film director, television presenter and screenwriter
- Horst Hajekb. 1944ATAustrian university teacher (1944-2013)
- Rosemarie Hajekb. 1951DEGerman politician
- Anne Hajekb. 1951USAmerican politician
- Ann E. Hajekb. 1952USUS entomologist
- Ivan Hájekb. 1962CZCzech composer
- Dave Hajekb. 1967USAmerican baseball player
- Andreas Hajekb. 1968DEGerman rower
- Jens Hajekb. 1968DEGerman actor
- Peter HajekCZBritish psychologist
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 28 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.2K | #12,764 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.1K | #14,172 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2K | #14,307 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 132 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 132 | #23,904 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 121 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 121 | #25,292 |
| HR Croatia | DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form) | 2021 | 89 | #8,711 |
| HR Croatia | DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021) | 2021 | 79 | — |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 6 | #111,942 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 6 | #19,892 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Hajek mean, and where does it come from?
- Czech (Hajek); 1. occupational name for a woodman or topographic name for someone who lived by a thicket or grove, from Czech hajek ‘thicket’, from hdj ‘grove’, or directly from hdj ‘grove’, the dimin… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Hajek?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈhaɪɛk/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Hajek have the most bearers?
- In Czechia, the national register counted about 10 thousand people named Hajek, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hájek.
- Where is Hajek most common?
- Hajek is densest in Czechia, where the national register counts about 1 in 1.0 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Hajek?
- In Czechia, the national register counted 10,203 people named Hajek, about 1 in 1.0 thousand residents.
- How common is Hajek compared with other names?
- In Czechia, Hajek is the 23rd most common surname of 114,573 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hajek?
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/hajekThe 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, “Hajek” — the 23rd most common surname in Czechia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.