The present study provides the structural and semantic description of the names of the Virgin icons in Russian and Polish languages. There is a special group of proper names in the structure of onomastic lexicon related to religion called “hagionyms”. This group includes a subgroup of nominations of icons, called “icononyms” and considered as a multicomponent appellative onomastic unit consisting of nuclear and peripheral, obligatory and optional components. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that for the first time Russian-Polish names of Virgin icons are analyzed not only in terms of the comparison of languages, but also through the comparison of Orthodox and Catholic confessions. For this purpose, the paper involves the description of Russian Orthodox and Catholic nominations and Polish Orthodox and Catholic names of icons. The study is interdisciplinary, as it is conducted with the involvement of data from religious studies, comparative theology, and cultural studies. Various sources with the description of icons (about 800 Russian and more than 400 Polish) came up as the material of the study. The study resulted in detecting the semantic similarity in the names of some iconographic types, revealing confessional and linguocultural peculiarities that reflected in the ways of nomination of Theotokos icons.
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Bugaeva et al. (2024) studied this question.