Scarlett

Scarlett began as a job rather than a color. In medieval England the surname marked a person who traded in scarlet, the rich dyed cloth whose name reaches back through Old French escarlate to a Latin root. The meaning is plain enough: scarlet, red. A dyer's trade slowly turned into a family name, and that family name became a first name for girls.

For centuries it stayed a surname. Then Margaret Mitchell gave her heroine the name Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, and readers met a woman who was stubborn and hard to forget. The novel, and the film that followed, fixed the name in the English-speaking imagination.

No tidy Polish diminutives wait for it. On a school register in Warsaw, Scarlett sits without a Polish nickname of its own, spelled with the double t that holds its English shape. What the name still says is a color: scarlet, red.