Kay

Kay reaches English by two roads.

The first runs through Katherine. Kay serves as a short form of that older name, whose roots go back to Greek Aikaterinē. Through that link the name is counted as Greek in origin, even when it stands alone on a form with three letters and nothing else.

The second road is a battlefield. In Arthurian legend, Sir Kay is King Arthur's foster brother and steward, a blunt and quarrelsome fighter who appears as early as the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen. From this knight the sense of "warrior" attached itself to the name. That meaning grew from story. The Greek root says nothing about war.

So Kay holds both a scholar's pedigree and a soldier's name. On a Polish class register it would sit oddly, foreign and short, read once and remembered. The short form points back to Katarzyna, and the knight points to the meaning the name still keeps, warrior.