Zaja
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/zəʒə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Zaja is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Croatia than in any other country.
- HRCroatia1 in 4.4K(measured from records)
- SISlovenia≈1 in 82K
- RSSerbia≈1 in 433K
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.
- Croatia (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 31 (measured from records)
- 1 in 4.4K (inferred from the name graph)
958 people, 2021
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Croatia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Žaja in HR Croatia, RS Serbia.
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Zaja 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HR Croatia | #711 | 958 | 1 in 4.4K | 958 | Žaja | 31 |
| US United States | — | ≈98 est. | ≈1 in 3.4M | listed | Zaja | 9 |
| IT Italy | — | ≈83 est. | ≈1 in 753K | 1 | — | 4 |
| SI Slovenia | — | ≈26 est. | ≈1 in 82K | 31 | — | 2 |
| PL Poland | — | 22 | 1 in 1.7M | 15 | — | — |
| RS Serbia | — | ≈16 est. | ≈1 in 433K | — | Žaja | 2 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 7 | 1 in 1.2M | 7 | — | 1 |
958 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); SURS — resident population given names; the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend). 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)
Zaja is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Hungarian, third-person singular single-possession possessive of zaj
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Markus Zajab. 1964DEGerman university teacher, writer and saxophonist
- Anna Zajab. 1991DEGerman tennis player
- Ivan ZajaHRresearcher
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 22 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 15 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 15 | #108,554 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 7 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 7 | #79,838 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 7 | #173,533 |
| IT Italy | 意大利语姓名译名手册 (Xinhua Italian Name Manual) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- 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
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
- How do you pronounce Zaja?
- A machine transcription gives /zəʒə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Zaja have the most bearers?
- In Croatia, the national register counted about 958 people named Zaja, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled žaja.
- Where is Zaja most common?
- Zaja is densest in Croatia, where the national register counts about 1 in 4.4 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Zaja?
- In Croatia, the national register counted 958 people named Zaja in 2021, about 1 in 4.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Zaja compared with other names?
- In Croatia, Zaja is the 711th most common surname of 72,581 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Zaja?
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/zajaThe 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, “Zaja” — the 711th most common surname in Croatia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.