All posts in Czech & Slovak Surnames & Name Origins

A Czech or Slovak surname can tell you a trade, a trait, an ancestor’s first name or the language your family lived alongside, and it can also mislead you, because the names have been spelled, gendered, translated and respelled across borders and centuries. This guide…

The ending of a Czech or Slovak surname tells you something about its type, and it also changes depending on whether the bearer is a man or a woman and whether the name is used for one person or a family. This guide explains the…

If you are tracing a Czech or Slovak woman, her surname will usually look different from her brother’s, and the rules about it changed recently. The feminine ending -ová is one of the most recognizable features of Czech and Slovak names, and it is a…

One Czech or Slovak family can appear in different records under half a dozen spellings, and all of them can be right. The causes are the diacritics that other languages drop, the phonetic respelling by immigrants, the Hungarian and German forms used by officials and…

Novák and Svoboda lead the Czech lists, and Horváth and Kováč lead the Slovak ones. The counts are real, but they come from different years and methods, and Czech counts stopped being published in 2016. This guide gives the top names, what they mean, how…