Wirginiusz

The name comes from Latin. Wirginiusz descends from the Roman family name Verginius, later linked to virgo, the Latin word for maiden. The short meaning attached to it is "maiden, virginal," a sense that grew from that link rather than from the old gens name. Roman families took their names long before anyone read a moral into them.

Its cross-gender partner is Wirginia, the form most Polish readers meet first. A boy called Wirginiusz stands beside that more familiar feminine name.

The sense of purity came later. In Livy's history, a father named Verginius kills his daughter Verginia to keep her from dishonour, and the story fixed the family name in Roman memory. Centuries on, the Latin root still points back to virgo, and the meaning "virginal, pure" travels with it.

On a Polish class register, Wirginiusz is rare. It reads as older and Latinate. The name-day and the paperwork spell out what the diminutive Wirginia already says: a maiden.