Puja

The name Puja comes from Sanskrit pūjā, the word for worship and the act of honoring a deity with offerings. In Hindu practice, a puja is the ritual itself: flowers, light, water set before an image. The English gloss keeps that meaning plainly. Puja means worship.

Its origin sits outside the usual European stock that fills Polish registers, which is why the site files it under "other." The Polish sense, oddanie czci, holds the same idea of reverence offered up. A person named Puja carries a common noun turned personal, a habit familiar across South Asian naming, where devotional words become given names.

In a Kraków classroom, a Puja on the register would stand apart from the Zuzannas and Julias, with no name-day to mark and no Polish diminutive waiting for her. That is the plain fact of a borrowed name here. It has no variant, no cross-gender pair, no imieniny in the church calendar. What it has is the meaning, steady and legible: pūjā, worship.