Kamil

Kamil comes from the Latin camillus, the word Rome used for a freeborn boy who assisted a priest at sacrifices and rituals. He carried the sacred vessels and stood close to the altar. So the plain meaning, an attendant at a religious ceremony, sits right in the name's roots. The Polish gloss, szlachetnie urodzony chłopiec, points to the same duty, since only a child of good birth came near the rites.

The name later gained a Christian patron in Camillus de Lellis, a sixteenth-century Italian who founded an order to care for the sick. His feast falls in mid-July, and Polish men named Kamil keep their imieniny then. On a school register, Kamil rarely sits alone; the feminine forms Kamila and Kamilla appear a few rows down.

Kamil stayed steady in Poland. It is short, ends on a hard consonant, and needs no nickname. Beside it stand the variants Kamila and Kamilla, drawn from the same Roman camillus.