The article attempts to reconstruct the connotative meaning of the Russian personal name Maria as compared to Polish Maria and French Marie, based on the analysis of their appellative derivatives in the respective languages. The authors distinguish between two groups of deonyms: the fi rst group includes names designating woman in general, the second one includes names that somehow characterize woman. The second group displays a very stereotypical range of meanings (‘slattern', ‘unthrifty woman', etc.) that can be found when analysing the appellative derivatives from many other names. However, the taking into account of both quantitative and qualitative features of the studied corpus of derivatives allows to conclude that in all three languages characterizing traits are peripheral in the connotative meaning of the names in question, which makes them specifi c as compared to other personal names. The authors also touch upon particular methodological issues related to the retrieval of ethnolinguistic information from onomastic data.