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A name. A world of connections.
Old Czech roots
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Czech
01 / Meaning & origin
Václav is a masculine given name documented in Czech and Slovak. English Wiktionary traces it to Old Czech Vácslav.
Separate records with matching spellings: Vaclav (Spanish, Slovene)
2 source accounts
Contraction of Old Czech Vácslav, from Proto-Slavic *Vęťeslavъ. By surface analysis, více + -slav (with the same meaning as Boleslav).
[1] tschechische Form von Wenzeslaus
02 / Across borders
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03 / By the numbers
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04 / Through time
Passages quoted verbatim from public-domain reference works. They reflect the scholarship of their time, not current consensus, and may use obsolete spellings.
Vaclav— “crown glory”
In this latter country it had, however, a far more sinister fame. Borivor and Ludmilla, the first Christian prince and princess of that duchy, had two grandsons, Boleslav and Vesteslav, or Venceslav, the first a heathen, the latter a Christian. Boleslav stirred up the pagan population against his brother, and murdered him while praying in church at Prague, on the 28th of September, 644, thus conferring on him the honour of a patron saint and centre of legends. The House of…
In this latter country it had, however, a far more sinister fame. Borivor and Ludmilla, the first Christian prince and princess of that duchy, had two grandsons, Boleslav and Vesteslav, or Venceslav, the first a heathen, the latter a Christian. Boleslav stirred up the pagan population against his brother, and murdered him while praying in church at Prague, on the 28th of September, 644, thus conferring on him the honour of a patron saint and centre of legends. The House of Luxemburg obtained the kingdom of Bohemia by marriage, and Venceslav was introduced among their appellations in the form of Wenzel; and the crazy and furious Bohemian king of that name sat for a few unhappy years on the imperial throne; but in spite of the odium of that memory, the name of good King Wenceslas, as we call it, held its ground, and contracts into Vacslav and Vaclav. Some say that it is crown glory, from _vienice_; others deduce the prefix from _vest_, the superlative of _veliku_, great, which furnished the Bulgarian Velika, Veleslav, Velimir.
Yonge, History of Christian Names (1884), Part VII (Names From The Slavonic), Section IV (Names of Might) · Public domain (Project Gutenberg)
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06 / Behind the facts
Review status: Source-reported — no editorial review recorded yet. Last data change 2026-10-15.
Wiktionary text: CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikidata: CC0. Commons recordings retain their individual file licences. Complete attribution is available in each group above and alongside each chart.
