Samantha

Samantha begins with Samuel, a Hebrew name meaning "God has heard." The feminine form took shape in English use, and by the eighteenth century it turns up in records across England and its American colonies. The ending pulled a second meaning toward it. Many trace the "-antha" to the Greek anthos, "flower," which gave Samantha its softer gloss, a bloom set beside the older prayer.

So the name holds two readings at once. In Polish it comes through as kwiat boży and bóg wysłuchał, the flower of God and the answered prayer. Both belong to it.

The name is short. On a Polish class register it sits among the newer arrivals, a form with no diminutive of its own and no cross-gender variant, written plainly as Samanta. What it offers is the Hebrew root under an English surface: God has heard, and the flower grown from that hearing.