Denis

The root is Greek. Denis comes from Dionysios, built from the name of Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre, so the old sense reads as "devoted to Dionysus." Through the Latin Dionysius the name lost length and grew common, and in France it found a patron. Denis of Paris, a bishop killed in the third century, became patron saint of the country, and French kings were later buried in the basilica that bears his name.

Russian took the same root and kept it close to daily speech. Denis Fonvizin, the eighteenth-century playwright behind The Minor, carried it into Russian letters, where it has stayed ordinary and well used.

The feminine variant denisa turns up in Polish and Czech registers, a small shift that opens the name to a daughter. On a class list it sits among older Polish forms without any strain. The literal meaning, "devoted to Dionysus," is far older than any saint, and it still rests under the plain modern spelling: denis.