Brzeziński
Brzeziński (feminine: Brzezińska, plural: Brzezińscy) is a Polish surname. History. The surname is derived from the root word "brzoza" ("brzez-" in some compound words), meaning "birch". The adjective suffix "ski" means "being like" or "belonging to", so Brzeziński refers to a person from one of the localities named for a concentration of birch trees, such as Brzezina, (a small village in Western Pomerania). In Polish, Brzeziński has a diacritic over the letter "ń", and the Polish pronunciation is "bzhe-ZEEGN-ski" (where GN sounds like the NI of "onion"). The Brzeziński surname was originally borne only by the szlachta , the Polish noble class, who took their names from their estates, but it later spread to the working and peasant classes as well. It is known to be associated with at least nine different coats of arms: There were 25,361 persons with the name Brzeziński in Poland in 1990. The name has been borne by many notable Poles and persons of Polish descent, including: