Fabiola

Fabiola comes from Latin, a feminine offshoot of the old Roman family name Fabius. That family traced its label back to faba, the humble bean, so the name means, quite literally, "bean." In Polish that is bób or fasola, the stuff of thick winter soup.

The name found a real person early. Saint Fabiola of Rome, a fourth-century noblewoman and friend of Saint Jerome, gave away her fortune to found what many call the first public hospital in the Christian West. Her feast falls on 27 December. Centuries later Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman borrowed her for his 1854 novel Fabiola, which carried the name into Italian and Spanish homes where it still lives.

So the meaning is farm-plain, and the history is anything but.

Today the name reads as Italian or Spanish more than Roman. A Polish teacher calling the register might pause at Fabiola between a Zuzanna and a Wojciech. It sits there, foreign and old at once, a bean by root and a saint by memory.