Lily

Lily grows from the Latin lilium, the word Romans used for the flower itself. The short meaning stays close to that root: the lily flower, or kwiat lilii in Polish. English speakers took to it during the Victorian era, when botanical names came into fashion for girls, and that English association is what brought the name to Polish attention.

In Polish it picks up forms of its own. Lila works as a variant, standing on its own as a given name. Lilka is the diminutive. It is the version a teacher reads from the class register on the first day of school, when a full name feels too formal for a small child.

The flower behind the name has long been read as a sign of purity in Christian art, where the white Madonna lily appears beside images of Mary. That sense of purity attached itself to the plant, and later to the people named for it, well after Latin already had a word for the flower. Behind every Lila and Lilka sits the same root, lilium.