Sáva

given name · Latin script

(measured from records)Officially recorded in 2 countries

/ˈsaːva/(recorded in a dictionary) Czech · from Wiktionary

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Sáva is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Croatia than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From the name of saints venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church, called Sabbas in English.

  • MDMoldova1 in 4.2K(measured from records)
  • HRCroatia1 in 4.5K
  • SISlovenia1 in 15K

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.

Croatia (measured from records)

933 people, 2021

Record sources
24 (measured from records)

corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling

strongest: reference-verified

1 in 4.2K (inferred from the name graph)

Moldova

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)Make your nomograph ✦

Spellings & scripts

(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Sava 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)

From the name of saints venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church, called Sabbas in English.

Cited for this meaning 2

  • Wiktionary
  • Skok, Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (1971-74)

Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

(measured from records)

Sáva 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.

Where Sáva is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
HR Croatia9331 in 4.5K933——
MD Moldova7951 in 4.2K795—2
US United States5491 in 606K737Sava5
PL Poland1501 in 255K144——
SI Slovenia1431 in 15K81—1
AL Albania731 in 42K67——
LV Latvia611 in 31K63——

933 people counted by DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form), 2021. 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: DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); e-services.md — living population register; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; dane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20); SURS — resident population given names; INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts); PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register); PMLP — Personvārdu meklētājs (per-name population-register lookup). 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 names spelled this way

(inferred from the name graph)

Sáva is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish given name13 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, Peru, United States, Argentina

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Sava, Sąva, Şava, Savá, Sãvå

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Sava, Savà

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses

(measured from records)

Sáva 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 Serbo-Croatian, f, hidronim 'Sava'

    as a wordSkok, Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (1971-74)

  • In Serbo-Croatian, m, osobno ime; hipokoristici i izvedenice od Sabbas

    as a wordSkok, Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (1971-74)

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)
18001850190019502000Sáva Chilandarec, b. 1837Sava Henția, b. 1848Sava Chukalov, b. 1889Sava Sever, b. 1905Sáva Heřman, b. 1926Sáva Smažík, b. 1931Sáva Prošek, b. 1931Sáva Šabouk, b. 1933Sava Ranđelović, b. 1993

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)
InformalAhoj Sáva,Hi Sáva, (English)

A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.

Evidence

(measured from records)

5 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 2 countries.

Reference works 2

  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

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 Sáva mean, and where does it come from?
From the name of saints venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church, called Sabbas in English. Recorded by Wiktionary and Skok, Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (1971-74).
How do you pronounce Sáva?
In Czech /ˈsaːva/ (Wiktionary).
In which country does Sáva have the most bearers?
In Croatia, the national register counted about 933 people named Sáva, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Sáva most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Sáva is densest in Moldova — about 1 in 4.2 thousand people — even though Croatia holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Sáva?
In Croatia, the national register counted 933 people named Sáva in 2021, about 1 in 4.5 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Sáva?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/s%C3%A1va

The 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, “Sáva”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.

See how Sáva parses inside a full name →