Temuri

Temuri means iron, żelazo in Polish, and that meaning is literal, not a gloss stuck on afterward. It sits in the sound. The name traces back to the Turkic and Mongolic word temür, "iron," the same root that produced the better-known name Timur. Here the origin is filed simply as other, outside the usual Latin and Greek channels a Polish register tends to hold.

That iron-word travelled far. Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror whom Europe called Tamerlane, wore it as his given name; he died in 1405, having built an empire around Samarkand. Temuri is at home in Georgian, where the shorter Temur is heard too.

A child called Temuri in a Polish szkoła would stand a little apart on the class register, the name unfamiliar next to Jakub and Zofia. There is no name-day for it in the Polish calendar. What it names is plain and old: iron, temür in the original.