Wasilisa

Wasilisa comes from Greek, from basílissa, the word for a queen and the feminine of basileús, king. The masculine relative is Bazyli, and further east Wasyl, and behind all of them stands the same royal root. The short meaning holds up. In Polish it reads as królowa, queen, and that sense sits at the front of the name rather than arriving as a later gloss.

The name traveled north into Russian tradition, where Vasilisa became a familiar figure. Russian folk tales gave us Vasilisa the Beautiful, who is handed impossible tasks by her stepmother and comes through each one. By way of that Russian association the name reached Polish registers, still rare, still eastern in sound.

A child called Wasilisa on a Polish class register stands out at once. The spelling with w marks the Slavic route the name took. No standard Polish diminutive attaches to it, so the full form does all the work. It stays what it began as, a Greek word for queen.