Cătălina

Cătălina is the Romanian form of the name English speakers know as Catherine and Poles as Katarzyna. All of them trace back to Greek Aikaterine, the name of the saint of Alexandria whose cult spread across Europe. The Romanian spelling, with its soft ă and the stress landing on the second syllable, sits comfortably in a Polish class register beside Katarzyna.

The meaning most people attach to it is "pure", czysta in Polish. That sense arrived late. It was linked to the Greek word katharos, meaning clean or pure, by people who reshaped the older, murkier name to fit a Christian ideal. The link is an association, not the true root, which remains uncertain.

So a girl called Cătălina carries a Greek origin and a borrowed meaning at once. On a Polish urząd form the name reads as foreign, a little southern, marked by that accented vowel. Yet the saint behind it is the same one honoured on Polish name-days in November. The origin is Greek. The sense of "pure" was fitted to it afterward.