Katerina

Katerina comes from Greek, a close relative of the older Aikaterine that moved west and settled in Poland as the variant Katarzyna. Katerina keeps its sound nearer that Greek root. The meaning "pure," czysta in Polish, was attached to the name later, once people tied it to the Greek word katharos, meaning clean. That reading was a gloss, added after the fact.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria carried the name into Christian Europe, and her cult made it ordinary across Polish lands by the medieval period.

In daily speech the name shortens to Kasia. That is the form a girl answers to on a school register years before she signs the full Katarzyna on any official document. Kasia belongs to friends. Katarzyna belongs to the urząd. Her name day is the 25th of November, and the night before it once held a men's fortune-telling custom, the katarzynki, a counterpart to the better-known andrzejki. The old story of "pure" still follows the name, though its beginning stays with the Greek.