Yekatierina
Rare to the point most Poles will never meet one: fewer than 30 women in Poland carry it, and no girl has been given it in years. A Russian spelling of a Greek name meaning "pure".
Yekatierina Pronunciation
Yekatierina is pronounced ih-e-kaht-ye-REE-nah (/ɨɛkatjɛˈrina/).
What Yekatierina means
Where Yekatierina comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Yekatierina is the Russian form of a Greek name, Aikaterine. Scholars have argued over its oldest meaning for a long time. Nobody has settled it. The sense of "pure" came later, when speakers tied the name to the Greek word katharos, meaning clean or pure. So the meaning grew onto the name instead of starting it off.
In Russia the name belongs above all to Yekaterina Alekseyevna, better known as Catherine the Great. She was born a German princess and took the Russian name in 1744, when she converted to Orthodoxy. She ruled for thirty-four years under a name she had chosen for herself.
On a Polish class register, Yekatierina looks foreign next to Katarzyna, its home-grown cousin. The two share one Greek root and one saint behind them. What the name offers a Polish reader is the plain sense it picked up along the way: pure, czysta.
How many people are named Yekatierina
1 in 834957 women in Poland is named Yekatierina. 27 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #8195 among female names.