Onufry

Onufry reaches Polish from the Greek Onouphrios. Behind that Greek form sits an older Egyptian word, Wenen-nefer, read as "he who is good" or "he who is happy." It began as a title for the god Osiris and later settled onto a man's name.

The man most Poles picture is Saint Onufry, a fourth-century hermit who lived alone in the Egyptian desert. His name-day falls on 12 June. Sienkiewicz handed the name to Jan Onufry Zagłoba, the boastful and cunning nobleman of the Trylogia, and for many readers that character now owns it.

Polish folk speech reworked Onufry into pasterz osłów, a shepherd of donkeys. That reading came later, a play on the sound rather than anything in the Greek root. The desert saint and the donkey herder sit oddly side by side.

Look for it now in a school register, tucked between newer names. It is rare. The meaning holds: "he who is good," carried out of Egypt, through Greek, into Onufry.