Boris Family History

Slovak: from the personal name Boris which is often taken as a shortening of the Slavic personal name Borislav composed of the elements bor ‘to fight’ (from Old Slavic boriti se) + slav ‘glory’ or ‘famous’ (from Old Slavic slava ‘glory’) but more probably it is an altered form of the Old Bulgarian personal name Bogoris (a byname from Turkic bogori ‘small’) borne by the king of the Bulgars (sometimes known as Boris) who was converted to Christianity in 86.

The name Boris was later also borne by a Russian prince murdered in 1015 whose baptismal name was Roman and who is venerated as a saint in the Orthodox Church. Altered form of Polish, Ukrainian, and Rusyn Borys, a cognate of 1 above.

Slovak (Boriš): from a short form of any of various Slavic compound personal names containing the element bor ‘to fight’, e.g. Borislav (see 1 above). The homonymous Sorbian cognates Boriš (Upper Sorbian) and Bóriš (Lower Sorbian) are found in Germanized and Americanized forms only (see Borisch and Borish).

Hungarian: from Boris, a pet form of the female personal name Borbála or, in some cases, possibly from the male personal name Barabás.