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Russian Middle Names

80 Russian names with meanings and pronunciation — starting with the patronymic, which is not like a middle name but simply is the Russian middle name.

Every Russian has three names, and the one in the middle is a patronymic: the father's given name plus an ending that means "child of." A man whose father is Ivan is Ivanovich; his sister is Ivanovna. That is the whole system, and it is compulsory. It appears on the internal passport, on every official form, on a school register and on a hospital chart. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky had a father called Mikhail. Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova had a father called Andrei. Nobody chooses a patronymic and nobody has two, because it is not a name given to a child so much as a fact recorded about them — which is exactly why it fills the middle slot so completely that Russians find the Anglo-American practice of picking a middle name faintly arbitrary.

The endings are regular enough to build one yourself. Male: -ovich after most consonants (Ivan → Ivanovich, Vladimir → Vladimirovich, Alexander → Alexandrovich), -evich after a soft consonant or -i (Sergei → Sergeyevich, Nikolai → Nikolayevich, Dmitri → Dmitrievich), and -ich for a small old class ending in -a or -ya (Ilya → Ilyich, as in Lenin, whose father was Ilya). Female: -ovna, -evna, and the rare -inichna (Ivanovna, Sergeyevna, Nikolayevna, Ilyinichna). A few stems shift: Pyotr gives Petrovich and Petrovna, not Pyotrovich. In everyday life the patronymic is not ceremonial padding but the ordinary respectful form of address: you call a teacher, a doctor or your mother-in-law by first name plus patronymic, Ivan Ivanovich or Tatiana Sergeyevna, with no title in front. It is warmer than "Mr." and more formal than a first name, and English has nothing that does the same job.

For a Russian-speaking family raising a child in an English-speaking country, this yields a genuinely elegant option that most parents never consider: give the real patronymic as the legal middle name. If the father is Michael, the daughter is Mikhailovna and the son Mikhailovich; if he is David, Davidovna and Davidovich. It is correct Russian, it is the name the child's grandmother will use anyway, and unlike a borrowed given name it says something true. The alternative — a Russian given name in the middle slot — is the more common choice and works fine, and the lists below are for that. One caution if you go that way: pick the full form, not the diminutive. Russian nicknames are an entire grammar of their own, and Sasha, Masha, Katya, Dima, Misha, Nastya, Lena, Kolya and Volodya are affectionate short forms of Alexander, Maria, Ekaterina, Dmitri, Mikhail, Anastasia, Yelena, Nikolai and Vladimir. They are lovely, and no Russian would ever write one on a document. Sasha as an English given name is a fine choice on its own terms; as a Russian one it reads like putting "Bobby" on a birth certificate. Our traditions guide covers the parallel Icelandic and Ethiopian patronymic systems.

Surnames are gendered too, which surprises people filling in forms. A family surname ending in -ov, -in or -sky takes -ova, -ina or -skaya for a woman: Karenin and Karenina are husband and wife, and Sharapov's daughter is Sharapova. Most Russian American families flatten this and give everyone the masculine form, which is a reasonable compromise, but it is worth knowing what has been flattened.

Pronunciation is mostly straightforward once three things are settled. Kh is not a k: it is the rasp at the end of Bach, so Mikhail is mee-kha-EEL, not "mick-hail." Zh is the s in "measure," which is why Nadezhda is na-DYEZH-da and Zhukovsky begins with the sound in "vision." And stress is unpredictable, unmarked in writing, and changes the vowels around it: an unstressed o collapses to an "a," so Nikolai is nee-ka-LIE and Moskva is mask-VA. Transliteration has never been standardised, so the same name reaches English several ways — Ekaterina and Yekaterina, Fyodor and Fedor, Aleksandr and Alexander, Dmitri, Dmitry and Dmitriy, Natalya and Natalia, Sofya and Sofia. None is wrong; pick one and use it consistently on documents. Two useful notes on the names themselves: Nikita is a men's name in Russia, whatever it has become in the West, and Vera, Nadezhda and Lyubov are Faith, Hope and Love, the three daughters of Saint Sophia in the Orthodox calendar, still occasionally given to three sisters.

Top picks, annotated

For girls

For boys

Pairing rule for Russian middles: the girls' names almost all end in an unstressed -a and the boys' names almost all end in a hard consonant, so the two lists behave completely differently in the slot. An -a ending needs a consonant-initial surname or it dissolves: Chloe Anastasia Ivanov is fine, Chloe Anastasia Orlov is not. The boys' names are the opposite — Lev, Igor, Anton and Pavel end so abruptly that they want a surname with some length after them, and against a one-syllable surname you get three blunt hits in a row. If you are using a patronymic, remember it is four or five beats and heavily back-weighted (Ni-ko-LA-yev-na), so it needs a short first name in front and works best with a surname that is not itself Russian; Grace Mikhailovna Bennett lands, while Anastasia Nikolayevna Vinogradova is a full sentence.

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Nearby origins: Polish, which shares the Slavic roots but not the patronymic, plus Greek, the source of half these saints' names, and Scandinavian for the other patronymic tradition — or all 24 origin lists. If you are naming for a grandfather, see honoring family. By style, these sit with classic middles.