Zbigniew

Zbigniew is an old Slavic name, built the way early Polish names often were, from two small pieces joined together. One piece points to getting rid of something, the other is gniew, the ordinary word for anger. Put together they give the reading offered here: to dispel anger. The feminine variant zbigniewa follows the same pattern.

That sense of dispelling anger reads less like a definition than like a wish folded into sound. Whether it was ever meant so literally, we cannot know, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that both roots are genuine Slavic material, the same gniew a Pole still uses today when cross.

The name found famous bearers. Zbigniew Herbert, one of Poland's major poets, lived from 1924 to 1998. Zbigniew Boniek, born 1956, ranks among the best footballers the country produced. On a school register in Poland the name still turns up, shortened by friends to Zbyszek. Its name-day falls on the seventeenth of March. Say the short form or the full one, and you are holding the same two roots: away with anger, gniew dispelled.