Dominica

Dominica comes from Latin, built on `dominus`, the word for lord or master. The meaning is plain: belonging to the lord. The same root gave Romance languages their word for Sunday, `dies Dominica`, the Lord's day, which survives in Spanish `domingo` and Italian `domenica`. So the name and a day of the week grew from one seed.

Its more familiar Polish forms sit close by. `Dominika` is the everyday variant a girl is likely to carry on a class register. `Dominik` is the masculine form, sharing the exact origin and meaning. All three trace back to the thirteenth-century Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, whose feast still anchors the name-day for people who bear these names.

To read `Dominica` on an old parish record is to meet the older, more Latinate spelling before `Dominika` settled into common use. The word has not drifted far from its source. A bearer today holds the same sense a Roman would have recognised: belonging to the lord.