Oksana

Oksana grew up in Ukrainian soil, a Slavic name that Ukrainians made their own. The variant Aksana turns up too, harder at the front, the same name wearing different shoes. Its short meaning in English is hospitality, in Polish gościnność, and that sense arrived through kinship with Ksenia, the Slavic cousin drawn from Greek Xenia. So the welcome in the name is a family inheritance rather than a literal root.

Readers of Gogol know it well. In his 1832 tale about the night before Christmas, Oksana is the proud village beauty whom the blacksmith Vakula chases across a frozen night. That Oksana is proud and teasing on the page. She gave the name a face for generations of readers.

In the twentieth century it belonged to Oksana Baiul, who won Olympic figure-skating gold for Ukraine in 1994, at sixteen. Picture a Polish class register with one Oksana among the Kasias and Anias, her name flagged for anyone who asks where it comes from. The answer is short. Slavic root, Ukrainian home, and a meaning of hospitality.