Oktawia

Oktawia comes from the Latin Octavia, the feminine of Octavius, and behind it sits the ordinary word octavus, eighth. In old Rome a child could be numbered by birth order, and the eighth to arrive might be counted in the name. The gens Octavia was a real Roman clan, and one of its daughters, Octavia the Younger, was the sister of the emperor Augustus.

The masculine variant is Oktawiusz. It rests on the same root, so the woman's name and the man's name both trace back to a plain number.

The sense of something noble or high-born came later, gathered from those Roman women who bore the name in the imperial family. The count itself stayed underneath. In Poland the name arrived in the nineteenth century and grew common through the 1960s and 1970s.

A girl named Oktawia now finds her imieniny marked on the twentieth of November. She may add her name to a class register beside two Julias and a Zofia. Whatever else the name has meant, its Polish meaning holds firm and short: ósma, the eighth.