Kevin

Kevin began as the Irish name Caoimhín. It joins the Old Irish word cóem, handsome or gentle, to gein, birth. Read the two parts together and you get handsome birth, the sense the name still carries in English.

The oldest famous bearer is Saint Kevin of Glendalough, a monk who settled in the Wicklow mountains in the sixth century and founded a monastery beside two dark lakes. His fame kept Caoimhín alive in Ireland for a long time. English speakers later smoothed the Irish spelling into Kevin, and by the middle of the twentieth century the name had travelled far past Ireland.

It has no Polish diminutives. In a Warsaw school register a Kevin sits among the Jakubs and the Szymons, an import that keeps its Celtic root whole. The name means what it always meant, handsome birth.