Polish name
Polish names and surnames
Polish names have two main elements: the given name, and the surname. The usage of personal names in Poland is generally governed by civil law, church law, personal taste and family custom.
Polish names are inflected for gender. Most female names end in the vowel -a, and most male names end in a consonant or a vowel other than a. There are, however, a few male names that end in a, which are often old and uncommon, such as Barnaba, Bonawentura, Jarema, Kosma, Kuba (formerly only a diminutive of Jakub, but nowadays also a given name on its own) and Saba. Maria is a female name that can also be used as a middle name for males.
Since the High Middle Ages, Polish-sounding surnames ending with the masculine -ski suffix, including -cki and -dzki, and the corresponding feminine suffix -ska/-cka/-dzka were associated with the nobility (Polish szlachta), which alone, in the early years, had such suffix distinctions. They are widely popular today.
Given names
A child in Poland is usually given one or two names; Polish registry offices do not register more than two. Among Catholics, who form the vast majority of the population, it is customary to adopt the name of a saint as an informal, third given name at confirmation, however, this does not have any legal effect.
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This entry incorporates text from “Polish name” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.