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Sonya

proper nounattested in dialogue

A female given name from Russian Соня (Sonja).

proper noun

  1. 1

    A female given name from Russian Соня (Sonja).

    It was Valery who had named her firstborn Sonya, after the figure skater Sonja Henie. "She moves through space so smoothly! She has such freedom!" she explained to Ray, the child's father. "Anything you want, honey," he replied, with a half-smile.

    He said nothing, then asked, “Is Sonya your real name?” “Harinderjeet.” “A good name. A strong name.” He could see her face in the bar's surface, frowning as she returned the card to her purse. “Is Sonya not a nice name?” He felt her leaning in. “A sexy name?”

Etymology

Borrowed from Russian and Ukrainian Со́ня (Sónja), an informal pet form of Со́фья (Sófʹja), Софі́я (Sofíja) or Софи́я (Sofíja, “Sofia, Sophia”), from the Ancient Greek σοφία (sophía, “wisdom”). It was introduced into English through 19th century Russian literature and taken into general use in early twentieth century.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).