Justyna

Justyna comes from Latin. The root is the adjective iustus, meaning just or upright, and the name is the feminine form of Justyn. Both descend from the Roman Iustinus. The short meaning holds close to that root: just, fair, righteous.

Saint Justina, a martyr of the early Church, gave the name its first well-known bearer, and by the fourteenth century Justyna had settled into ordinary Polish use. Polish calendars still mark her imieniny more than once a year, with the twenty-sixth of September and the seventh of October among the dates. For decades it stayed common here, especially among girls born in the 1980s.

On a school class register the name sits plainly, sometimes beside its variant Yustyna. What a girl inherits with it is an old Latin word for fairness.