A Slavic form of Joseph, from Hebrew Yosef, meaning "God will add."
Iosif is the Romanian, Georgian, and Church Slavonic form of Joseph, one of the most consequential names in world religious history. Its ultimate root is the Hebrew Yosef, meaning 'He will add' or 'May God increase' — a prayer of abundance spoken at a child's birth.
From Hebrew it traveled into Greek as Iōsēph, into Latin as Iosephus, and then fanned out across Europe, taking distinct shapes in each culture it touched: Giuseppe in Italian, José in Spanish, Józef in Polish, and Iosif in the Eastern Christian world. The name's most iconic bearer in its Hebrew original is the patriarch Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers and rising to become the administrator of Egypt — a narrative of resilience and providential reversal that has resonated across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for three millennia. In its Iosif form, the name is inseparable from two towering figures of the twentieth century: the Soviet dictator Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, born in Georgia under that given name, and the Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky, who signed his early Russian-language work as Iosif Brodsky before emigrating to the West.
Today Iosif remains common in Romania and Georgia, where it carries strong Orthodox Christian connotations, and appears in diaspora communities across Europe and North America. For parents of Eastern European or Caucasian heritage, it offers a deep-rooted alternative to the ubiquitous Joseph, preserving cultural memory in a single syllabic shift.