The Petrov surname means “Peter’s” or “son of Peter”, a patronymic built on the Slavic form of a Greek name that literally means rock. It belongs to Russia and Bulgaria in almost equal measure, and to Macedonia and Serbia besides.
What Does the Surname Petrov Mean?
Petrov means “of Peter” or “son of Peter”. It is a patronymic formed from the personal name Pyotr in Russian or Petar in Bulgarian, both descended from the Greek Petros, meaning “rock” or “stone”, by way of the Latin Petrus.
In Cyrillic the name is written Петров. The ending is not a suffix meaning “son of” in the way that Irish Mac or Scandinavian -sen are. The -ov is a possessive: it turns a first name into an adjective. Petrov is closer to “Peter’s” than to “Peterson”, and in its original grammar it still behaves that way, taking a feminine form for women.
So a man is Petrov and his sister is Petrova. Both mean the same thing. The system is set out in more detail on our page for the Ivanov surname, which runs on exactly the same machinery, and the two names have followed each other through Slavic history like a pair of shoes.
The root name matters. Peter was the apostle Christ renamed, and the pun on rock in Matthew 16:18 is the reason the name travelled so far. Every Petrov, Peterson, Pietri and Petrosyan in the world is a distant echo of one sentence about a stone.
Where the Petrov Name Comes From
Petrov comes from the Orthodox Slavic world, and it is genuinely shared between two countries rather than borrowed from one by the other. It is one of the most common surnames in both Russia and Bulgaria, and it is native to North Macedonia and Serbia as well.
Russia
Russia holds the largest number of Petrovs by a wide margin. Forebears counts roughly 430,000 bearers there, around one resident in 335, out of some 585,000 worldwide. The name sits in the front rank of Russian surnames alongside Ivanov, Smirnov, Kuznetsov and Popov.
Hereditary surnames spread slowly and unevenly through Russian society, reaching the nobility first and the peasantry last, and were not universal until the nineteenth century. A great many were simply frozen patronymics: the name a man’s father carried, fixed in place by a clerk and passed down thereafter.
Bulgaria
Bulgaria is the surprise for most readers, and it should not be. In the Bulgarian national ranking, Petrova and Petrov sit at seventh and eighth, immediately behind the Ivanovs, Georgievs and Dimitrovs. Relative to population, Bulgaria carries the name more densely than Russia does.
Bulgarian uses the same possessive endings as Russian, -ov and -ev, on the same stock of Orthodox baptismal names. A Bulgarian Petrov is not a Russian import. He is the product of a parallel naming system built from the same church calendar.
The Balkans
Petrov is also Macedonian and, less commonly, Serbian and Croatian, and it turns up in eastern Slovakia. In Serbian the far more usual form is Petrović, with the -ić suffix doing the patronymic work instead. The border between Petrov and Petrović is roughly the border between the Orthodox Slavic east and the South Slav lands that took the -ić ending.
Spelling Variants and Related Names
The commonest variants of Petrov are the feminine Petrova and the older transliterations Petroff and Petrof, which reflect how the final consonant is actually pronounced in Russian and Bulgarian. Petroff was the standard English spelling before the twentieth century settled on Petrov.
Within Russian, Petrovich is not usually a surname at all. It is the patronymic middle name carried by every son of a man called Pyotr, with Petrovna for daughters. In Serbian and Croatian the same element hardened into a true inherited surname, Petrović, and the American spelling Petrovich covers arrivals from both traditions.
Across the wider region the same root produced a whole family of names:
- Petrenko, Ukrainian, using the diminutive -enko ending rather than a possessive.
- Petrosyan, Armenian, from Petros with the Armenian -yan patronymic suffix.
- Piotrowski, sometimes written Pietrowski, Polish, from Piotr, but toponymic in form rather than patronymic.
- Petrescu in Romania, Petrov and Petkov side by side in Bulgaria.
- Petersen, Pedersen and Peterson in Scandinavia, the same idea expressed with -sen.
They are not related families. They are the same root, running through six or seven grammars.
The Petrovs in America
Petrovs arrived in America in two distinct streams, one Bulgarian and one Russian, and they landed in different decades and different cities.
The Bulgarian wave came first. Between 1903 and 1910, after the failed Ilinden uprising against Ottoman rule, roughly 50,000 people left Bulgaria proper and Ottoman Macedonia for the United States. They went to heavy industry. By 1910 close to 15,000 Bulgarian and Macedonian workers were in the steel mills around Chicago, and Granite City in southwestern Illinois held the densest Bulgarian settlement in the country, with the first Bulgarian Orthodox parish in America, Saints Cyril and Methodius, founded there in 1909. The community that grew from those mill years is still traceable among Bulgarians in Chicago.
The Russian stream ran later and in pulses: émigrés after 1917, displaced persons after 1945, Soviet Jewish emigration from the 1970s, and a large post-1991 movement. Each pulse chose its own ground. San Francisco’s Russian churches and shops anchored Russians in the Richmond District, while the late Soviet arrivals built the best-known Russian-speaking quarter in the country among Russians in Brighton Beach. Later professional migration went elsewhere entirely, to the technology corridor around Russians in Bellevue, Washington and the condominium towers of Russians in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.
American paperwork did something to the name that Slavic grammar never intended. English record-keeping has no gendered surnames, so a woman who was Petrova at home became Petrov on her forms. The 2010 Census shows the result plainly: 2,129 Petrovs against only 548 Petrovas, where a Bulgarian or Russian register would list the two in roughly equal numbers.
Notable People Named Petrov
Osip Petrov (1807 to 1878) was the founding bass of Russian opera. He created the role of Susanin in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in 1836 and sang at the Mariinsky in St Petersburg from 1830 until his death, creating roles for Mussorgsky, Dargomyzhsky and Rimsky-Korsakov along the way.
Stanislav Petrov (1939 to 2017) was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces. On 26 September 1983 he was the duty officer at the Serpukhov-15 command centre near Moscow when the Oko early-warning system reported five missiles launched from the United States. Petrov judged it a false alarm and waited for corroboration rather than passing the warning up the chain. None came. The system had misread sunlight on high-altitude cloud. The episode is documented in detail as the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.
Andrey Petrov (1930 to 2006) was a Soviet and Russian composer whose film scores are among the most widely known music of the late Soviet period.
Nadia Petrova (born 1982) reached world number three in both singles and doubles, taking 13 singles and 24 doubles titles on the WTA tour.
Stiliyan Petrov (born 1979) is Bulgaria’s most-capped footballer with 105 appearances. He won four Scottish league titles with Celtic and later captained Aston Villa.
How Common Is Petrov Today?
Petrov is a top-ten surname in Bulgaria and a front-rank one in Russia, but an uncommon name in the United States, ranking 14,113th in the 2010 Census with 2,129 bearers. Its American scarcity is a measure of migration, not of the name’s weight at home.
| US rank (2010 Census) | #14,113 |
|---|---|
| Americans with the name | 2,129 |
| Origin | Russian and Bulgarian (also Macedonian and Serbian) |
| Meaning | “Peter’s”, son of Peter, from Greek Petros, “rock” |
Of those 2,129 people, 95.63 per cent identified as white in 2010, with 2.44 per cent identifying as Hispanic and 1.03 per cent as two or more races. Those are self-identification proportions recorded on a census form, not a measure of ancestry.
The related spellings show how thoroughly the family scattered. America counts 2,485 Petroviches, 2,018 Petroffs, 1,895 Petrovics, 1,449 Petrosyans and 613 Petrenkos. Add them together and the Peter-patronymic family is several times larger than the Petrov column alone suggests.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the surname Petrov mean?
Petrov means “Peter’s” or “son of Peter”. It is a possessive form of Pyotr or Petar, the Slavic versions of the Greek name Petros, which means “rock” or “stone”. The feminine form is Petrova.
Is Petrov Russian or Bulgarian?
Both, genuinely. Russia has by far the most bearers in absolute terms, around 430,000, but Bulgaria carries the name more densely relative to its population, where Petrov and Petrova rank seventh and eighth nationally. It is also a native Macedonian and Serbian name.
Where does the Petrov family come from?
There is no single Petrov family or homeland village. The name arose independently wherever an Orthodox Slavic man named Peter had children whose patronymic was fixed as a surname, which happened thousands of times over across Russia, Bulgaria and the Balkans.
How common is the surname Petrov?
Worldwide there are roughly 585,000 Petrovs, making it around the 900th most common surname on earth. In the United States it is much rarer, ranked 14,113th in the 2010 Census with 2,129 bearers.
Is there a Petrov family crest or coat of arms?
No. In every serious heraldic tradition, arms are granted to an individual and pass to their direct descendants, never to everyone who happens to share a surname. Since Petrov arose separately in countless unrelated families, a single “Petrov crest” is a logical impossibility. Sites selling one are selling a decoration, not a lineage.
Why are Ivanov, Petrov and Sidorov used together in Russian?
The three names are the Russian equivalent of listing several John Does. Because Ivanov and Petrov are among the commonest surnames in the country, the trio has long served as a stand-in for anonymous or generic people in examples, forms and jokes.
If your family carries the Petrov name, its route from the Orthodox Slavic world to America is traceable. Atlas of Home can follow it from a Russian village register or a Bulgarian parish book to the mill town or city block where your family landed, and to wherever you are now.