Leah

The name Leah comes from Hebrew, and the meaning most often attached to it is "weary." Scholars have long debated whether that sense is original or a reading fixed to it later, since the same three consonants have also been tied to an old word for a wild cow. What Jewish tradition kept is the first sense.

Leah appears in the Book of Genesis as the elder daughter of Laban and the first wife of Jacob. She became the mother of six of his sons and of a daughter, Dinah, which makes her a matriarch of half the tribes of Israel. The text lingers on her fertility and on her long wish to be loved, since Jacob favored her sister Rachel.

In a Polish class register, Leah sits short and plain among longer names. It takes no diminutive. The Hebrew root behind it still reads, to most who look it up, as "weary."