Name Leonid - meaning, origin, numerology

Leonid is a Russian and Ukrainian version of the given name Leonidas. The French version is Léonide.

People with the name include:

• Leonid Andreyev (or Andrejew) (1871–1919), a Russian playwright and short-story writer who led the Expressionist movement in the national literature
• Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982), political leader of the USSR from 1964 to 1982
• Leonid Buryak (b. 1953), USSR/Ukraine-born Olympic-medal-winning soccer player
• Leonid Bykov (1928-1979), a Soviet-Ukrainian actor, film director, and script writer.
• Leonid Desyatnikov (b. 1955), a Russian opera and film composer
• Leonid Gaidai, (1923–1993) a popular Soviet comedy film director and People's Artist of the USSR in 1991
• Leonid Geishtor (b. 1936), USSR (Belarus)-born Olympic champion Canadian pairs 1,000-meter sprint canoer
• Leonid Gobyato (1875–1915), a Russian lieutenant-general and designer of the modern, man-portable mortar
• Leonid Feodorov (1879–1935), a bishop and Exarch for the Russian Catholic Church, and survivor of the GULAG
• Leonid Filatov (1946–2003), a Russian actor, director, poet, and pamphleteer, and People's Artist of Russia in 1996
• Leonid Hurwicz (b. 1917), Russian-born American economist and mathematician who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics
• Leonid Kadeniuk (b. 1951), the first astronaut of independent Ukraine who flew on NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997
• Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) a Soviet/Russian mathematician, economist, and only winner from the USSR of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1975)
• Leonid Kolumbet (b. 1937), Soviet-Ukrainian Olympic cyclist medalist
• Leonid Kravchuk (b. 1934) a Ukrainian politician who was elected the first President of Ukraine in 1991
• Leonid Kuchma (b. 1938), the second President of Ukraine (1994–2005)
• Leonid Kuravlyov (b. 1936) a Russian actor and People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1976
• Leonid the Magnificent, (Leonid Filatov, b. 1973) a Russian performance artist who became known nationwide after his appearances on America's Got Talent
• Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin/Léonide Massine,Russian choreographer and ballet dancer
• Leonid Mezheritski (1930–2007), USSR and Israeli still-life, portrait and landscape painter
• Leonid Moseyev (b. 1952), Soviet-Russian long-distance runner
• Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945), a Russian Impressionist painter
• Leonid Reiman (or Reyman) (b. 1957), a Russian businessman and government official, currently Minister of Communications and Information Technologies of the Russian Federation
• Leonid Rozhetskin, (b. 1966) an international financier and lawyer credited with bringing significant financial and legal advances to modern Russia
• Leonid Sagayduk (1929–1998), a Soviet swimmer
• Leonid Sobinov (1872–1934), a Russian opera singer and the People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1923
• Leonid Stadnyk (b. 1971), a Ukrainian man named "world's tallest living man" by Guinness World Records 2008
• Leonid Stein (b. 1934) Soviet Grandmaster chess player from Ukraine who was among the world's top ten players in the 1960s
• Leonid Taranenko (b. 1956) 1980 gold medallist in weightlifting for the Soviet Union
• Leonid Utyosov (Leyzer (Lazar) Vaysbeyn, or Weissbein) (1895–1982) a Russian jazz singer and comic actor, and People's Artist of the USSR in 1965

Fictional characters include:

• Leonid, the protagonist in Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 Russian science fiction novel Red Star
• Leonid, the protagonist in the Labyrinth trilogy of cyberpunk novels written in the late 1990s by Russian science fiction writer Sergey Lukyanenko (Labyrinth of Reflections, False Mirrors, and Transparent Stained-Glass Windows).
• Leonid Gorbovsky, a character in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's series of science fiction novels set in the Noon Universe written from the 1960s through the 1980s.
• Leonid Kovar, a Russian superhero also known as Red Star
• Leonid Pavel, a Russian nuclear scientist in The Dark Knight Rises

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Russian: from the Greek name Leonidas, a Spartan dialectal form of Leonidēs, borne by a king of Sparta who, with seven hundred followers, was killed by the invading Persians at the heroic defence of the pass at Thermopylae (480 BC). This action gave the rest of Greece time to arm and prepare to meet the invaders. He was named from his grandfather Leōn, the name being a patronymic derivative of Leōn ‘lion’. Later the name was borne by two early saints venerated especially in the Eastern Church: an Alexandrian, the father of Origen, martyred in 202, and an Egyptian martyred with several companions in 304.

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