> I thought "santa" meant "saint"?

Well, santa is a Spanish word meaning "holy" and saint is a cognate French word meaning the same thing. They descend from Latin sanctus; compare sanctify.

When the prayer goes "holy Mary, mother of god", "holy Mary" is an exact equivalent of "santa María".

Might as well mention “Sancta Marīa” in Latin, for example from the Christian Hail Mary[1], a recorded Latin version[2], written Latin next to English and Spanish[3] and of course translated into thousands of languages[4] although unfortunately mostly written using /A-Z/i; I am an atheist interested in languages.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Mary

[2] https://glaemscrafu.jrrvf.com/english/avemaria.html

[3] https://hymnary.org/text/hail_mary_full_of_grace_the_lord_is...

[4] http://www.marysrosaries.com/Rosary_prayers_in_different_lan...

In my mind, the Latin form of Mary is Mariam, because that's what my Latin teacher taught me. (He also commented that, unlike Greek names, Hebrew names never inflected in Latin, so that it would be "Mariam" regardless of what case the name should appear in.)

But it makes sense that Church Latin would be different.

“Santa” means “female saint” in Italian and Spanish. Perhaps the English “santa” came from another language but I always found the name “Santa Claus” just horrible.

The name Santa Claus evolved from Nick's Dutch nickname, Sinter Klaas, a shortened form of Sint Nikolaas (Dutch for Saint Nicholas)

https://www.history.com/.amp/topics/christmas/santa-claus#si...

It’s actually Sinterklaas (without a space) and we still call him that :) We also ended up re-importing the American Santa Claus, so these days we have two festive holidays in December.

The first mention of this version of Saint Nicholas's name has the form "St. A Claus" and appeared in the New-York Gazette of 20 Dec 1773.[1] The same issue also first reported some incident regarding tea in Boston harbour. Nice coincidence.

[1] Source: https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/12/st-claus-was-celebra...

The Tim Allen movie series in Spanish is titled "Santa Cláusula".

Saint is more or less the same as holy, just used as a title. It comes from Old French saint, seinte "holy, pious, devout," from Latin sanctus "holy, consecrated"

It does; the character originates from Saint Nicholas (or Odin, depending who you ask)

I thought it was a misspelling of Satan, but maybe that's because I'm Jewish.