Voivodeships of Poland - Etymology and Use of "voivodeship"

Etymology and Use of "voivodeship"

Some English-language sources, in historic contexts, speak of "palatinates" rather than "voivodeships"; the former term traces back to the Latin palatinus ("palatine"). More commonly used now is "voivodeship", a loanword-calque hybrid formed on the Polish "województwo". Other sources refer instead to "provinces" (Polish singular: "prowincja"), though in pre-1795 contexts this may be confusing because the cognate Polish "prowincyja" (as it was then spelled) was idiosyncratically applied, until the last of the three Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1795, to each of the three main Regions (Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, and Lithuania) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, each of those Regions in turn comprising a number of województwa (plural of "województwo").

The Polish "województwo", designating a second-tier Polish or Polish–Lithuanian administrative unit, derives from "wojewoda" (etymologically, a "war leader" or "leader of warriors", but now simply the governor of a województwo) and the suffix "-stwo" (a "state or condition").

The English "voivodeship", which is a hybrid of the loanword "voivode" and "-ship" (the latter a suffix, likewise meaning a "state or condition", that calques the Polish "-stwo"), has never been much used and is absent from many dictionaries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first appeared in 1792, spelled "woiwodship", in the sense of "the district or province governed by a voivode." The word subsequently also appeared in 1886 in the sense of "the office or dignity of a voivode."

An official Polish body, the Commission on Standardization of Geographic Names outside the Republic of Poland, recommends the spelling "voivodship", without the e. This is consistently reflected in publications and in the international arena, e.g., at the United Nations.