Lolita

Lolita comes to Polish from Spanish, and it traces back to a single Latin word: dolor, meaning pain or grief. In Spanish devotion the plural of that grief became a name, Dolores, honoring the Virgin under the title Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, Our Lady of Sorrows. From Dolores came the everyday Lola, and Lolita began as the affectionate diminutive of Lola. The short meaning stays close to the root: sorrows.

That heavy sense sits oddly on a name so light in sound. The ending, that soft -ita, is the Spanish way of making a word small and dear. So the name holds grief and tenderness together.

For much of the twentieth century Lolita traveled on its own charm, far from any chapel. A Polish child called Lolita today might turn up on a class register beside more familiar forms, sounding a little southern there. The origin stays fixed, though. Behind the four syllables stands dolor, and the meaning the name keeps in Polish is cierpienie.