Nikita

Nikita began in Greek. The masculine name Niketas grew from nikē, the word for victory, the same root that named the goddess Nike. To carry it was to be called unconquered, and the sense of triumph sat plainly in the sound for anyone who knew the Greek.

From Byzantium the name traveled north into the Slavic world, where it settled most firmly in Russia. It belonged to saints and to peasants and later to a Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, whose name reached well past the borders of Russian speech. In Russian usage Nikita stayed masculine, without the diminutives or cross-gender forms that soften many other names.

For a Polish family the spelling holds the same on a school register and on an official form at the urząd. The Greek meaning holds under it too: victorious, unconquered.