Anthony

The name Anthony comes to us through Latin, from the Roman family name Antonius. That family was old and widespread, and its name traveled across the empire with the people who carried it. The meaning often attached to it, "priceless one," came later. Scholars never settled on what Antonius first meant, so the sense of something excellent and priceless was fixed to the name over the centuries rather than carried from the start.

In English the name spread partly through Saint Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century preacher still asked to help find lost things. English speakers gave it the "th" sound and the spelling Anthony, while Poland kept the older shape: Antoni.

From Antoni come the forms a Polish child actually hears: Antek in the schoolyard, Tolek from a grandmother, Antonina for a girl who shares the root.

The Latin root gave the frame. Read a class register in any Polish school and an Antoni will likely be there, next to an Antek who is the same boy. Poland filled the name with a sense of the priceless and the wybitny.