Baby names · Russian origin

Saints, patronymics, and the endless diminutive

Russian naming runs on Orthodox saints' names worn into Slavic shapes, alongside native virtue names — the sisters Vera, Nadezhda and Lyubov are faith, hope and love calqued from Greek. Diminutives do enormous work: Nadezhda is always Nadya, Aleksandr is Sasha to everyone, and the shift between them carries the whole register of a relationship. Formal names are long; nobody uses them.

2 Russian names in our library · 2 girl