Andrzej

Andrzej reaches back to the Greek Andreas, formed from andreios, meaning manly, and behind that sits andros, the word for man. So the short sense, mężny and odważny, brave, was there in the Greek from the start. This is one of the older names in Poland, carried by kings and by the apostle Andrew.

The name bends easily. Jędrek is the warm, everyday form a boy answers to in a school register, while Andrei is the variant that turns up across the eastern border. Same root, different mouths.

Every year the name gets its own night. Andrzejki, the eve of Saint Andrew on the twenty-ninth of November, is when Poles pour wax through a key and read the shadow on the wall to guess what the future holds. The custom is old and still kept. A boy named Andrzej shares his name-day with a fortune-telling ritual, which few names can claim.

The meaning holds: manly, mężny, odważny.