Christos

Christos comes straight from Greek. The source is Χριστός, which means anointed, and behind that word stands the verb χρίω, chríō, to rub or smear with oil. Anointing once marked a person for a role that others in the crowd did not hold, and the oil was the sign of that setting-apart.

The Greek word was itself a translation of the Hebrew mashiach, the anointed one, which reaches English as Messiah. So the name and that title grow from a single root. To carry Christos is to carry a word that names a chosen place rather than a private trait, and the sense of anointing here is closer to being marked out than to any literal oil left on the skin.

On a Polish class register the name looks foreign beside Jan and Piotr, a Greek borrowing that Polish glosses as namaszczony. Read it slowly. One plain word, anointed, holds the whole reach of χρίω.