Andrea

Andrea comes from Greek. Behind it stand the word anēr, andros, meaning man, and the adjective andreios, brave. The short meaning holds to that root: mężny, dzielny, manly and brave.

In Italy the name belongs to men. Andrea Palladio, the sixteenth-century architect whose villas still stand across the Veneto, carried it. So did Andrea Doria, the Genoese admiral of the same century. An Italian boy named Andrea joins that line without a second thought.

For a Polish family the name reads differently. On a class register in Poland, Andrea usually marks a girl, and the ear has settled into that. The Greek sense of courage does not shift with the reading. It sits under the girl's name and the boy's alike.

Andrea takes no Polish diminutive. It stays whole, and it means brave.