Gender Masculine
Meaning & History
From a Bulgar Turkic name, also recorded as Bogoris, perhaps meaning "short" or "wolf" or "snow leopard". It was borne by the 9th-century Boris I of Bulgaria who converted his realm to Christianity and is thus regarded as a saint in the Orthodox Church. To the north in Kievan Rus it was the name of another saint, a son of Vladimir the Great who was murdered with his brother Gleb in the 11th century. His mother may have been Bulgarian.Other notable bearers of the name include the 16th-century Russian emperor Boris Godunov, later the subject of a play of that name by Aleksandr Pushkin, as well as the Russian author Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), the Bulgarian king Boris III (1894-1943), and the Russian president Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007).