Bianca

Bianca begins in the Late Latin word blancus, which meant white and lies behind Italian bianco and bianca. The name grew up as an Italian one, at home in Florence and Venice for centuries before it settled elsewhere. Its meaning is plain. White, and in Polish biała.

Shakespeare reached for it twice. There is the courted younger sister in The Taming of the Shrew, and there is the Bianca of Othello, linked to the officer Cassio. Both hold the same Latin sense of the color white. The habit of reading that white as brightness or purity came later; the origin is simply the shade itself, the one a laundered sheet has.

On a Polish class register, Bianca can look half homegrown, sitting between a Zofia and a Julia, though its line runs from Italy back through Latin. Say it and the color is right there. The root is blancus, and the meaning underneath stays biała.