Freya

Freya descends from Old Norse Freyja, the name the Scandinavians gave their goddess of love. Before it belonged to any goddess, freyja was a plain word for "lady" or "noble lady". The same Germanic root left its mark on German, where Frau still means woman and lady. Freyja even had a masculine twin, Freyr, whose name meant "lord".

The goddess rode a chariot pulled by cats and wore the necklace Brísingamen, and her name held its older sense of rank the whole time. So the meaning stayed close to the word. Freya means lady.

For a long time the name stayed mostly Scandinavian. In recent decades it has climbed the charts in Britain, and it now turns up on Polish school registers, read out at the start of the year. On such a list it sits without a diminutive, since Freya has no established Polish variants. What the name says is what the old word said: noble lady.