The aim of the article is to present various scopes of functioning and different ways of understanding the terms appearing most often in the Polish literature in relation to feminine nouns naming women. A specific terminological chaos arises from, on the one hand, different, often incompatible definitions of female names/feminatives quoted by language researchers and researchers, and on the other hand, from controversies and disputes observed in non-academic circles over the issue of women’s linguistic invisibility. This in turn results in the emergence of colloquial use or even variants of scientific terms in public communication. The authors present the understanding of the term ‘female names’ developed in the Wrocław research center and characterize it against the background of other concepts. They present terminological assumptions underlying the Dictionary of Polish Female Names (2015). The article also discusses the evolution of the scientific term ‘feminative’ and its penetration into general Polish, as well as the female ending-based forms that appear in colloquial Polish.