Leonid

Leonid comes from Greek. The root is leon, the lion, the same root behind Leonidas, the Spartan king who held the pass at Thermopylae. From that stem the name reached Russian, where it settled and grew common. The short meaning is plain: son of a lion.

In Russia the name belonged to many public men. Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union for nearly two decades. The writer Leonid Andreyev filled his stories with dread and shadow well before that. Through such bearers the name kept a Russian colour, even as its Greek bones stayed the same.

For a Polish child, Leonid arrives without diminutives and without a feminine partner. It stands as one form, short and firm. On a class register or an official form at the urząd it reads cleanly, a few syllables that trace back to a lion. Son of a lion: that is the sense a parent finds beside it.