Nila

Nila comes from Slavic roots, and its meaning is a colour: dark blue, the deep end of the sky before night settles. In Polish that is niebieska, or more exactly ciemnoniebieska, a blue with some density to it. The Polish word for blue, niebieski, grew out of niebo, the sky, so the name keeps company with the thing overhead.

The name travels light. It has no fixed diminutive, no standard variant, no saint fastened to a calendar date. A child called Nila arrives without the scaffolding of shortenings that Polish usually builds around a name. There is the short form and the colour behind it, and not much else in the way of baggage.

On a school register, Nila sits among the Zuzannas and the Amelias, four letters wide. What it holds is the origin and the meaning together: a Slavic name for dark blue.