Orion

Orion reached English from Greek, the name of the giant hunter in the old myths and of the constellation that still bears him. The Greek root stays uncertain. One thread of scholarship ties it to a word for boundary or limit, the line where one field ends and the next begins. Nobody has settled the matter.

For most of its history Orion was a point on a star chart before it was a first name. English speakers adopted it mostly in the last hundred years, pulled by the constellation more than the myth. The name has no diminutives and no separate feminine form, so it lands whole.

The idea of a boundary sits strangely on a hunter who kept none. Still, granica is the gloss the dictionaries attach. A boy named Orion at a Kraków urząd holds a Greek word whose exact origin nobody has fixed, and a winter constellation any parent can point out. The short meaning stays what it has been: boundary, limit.