Elwira

Elwira comes to Polish from Latin, and the meaning that has attached to it is a plain one: truly noble. That reading points at conduct rather than title, at how a person carries herself instead of what she inherits.

The sense of "noble" here is the kind that gathers around a name over centuries rather than sitting inside the root as a literal fact. Elwira has kept good company in that regard. Donna Elvira, one of the wronged women in Mozart's Don Giovanni, gave the name a stubborn, upright charge on the opera stage, and Bellini later handed it to the heroine of I puritani. The Polish spelling with a w is its own small act of settling in.

In a Polish calendar the name has room to breathe. Elwira has several name-days, among them 10 February and 25 August, so an imieniny can fall in deep winter or late summer.

Picture the E section of a class register, Elwira a line or two above Ewa. The word beside it, if anyone bothered to gloss it, would read prawdziwie szlachetna: truly noble.