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Anne vs Emma - What's the difference?

anne | emma |

As nouns the difference between anne and emma

is that anne is year while emma is (british|dated|wwi|signalese) m in.

anne

English

Etymology 1

The French spelling of (Ann), used interchangeably since the Middle Ages. From Vulgate (etyl) (m), from (etyl) , from the (etyl) female name {{m, he, ???, ??????, tr=Hannah), meaning 'grace; gracious'. Compare with (John).

Proper noun

(Annes)
  • .
  • * 1380s-1390s , :
  • Immortal God, that savedest Susanne / From false blame; and thou merciful maid, / Mary I mean, the daughter to Saint Anne , /Before whose child the angels sing Osanne,
  • * 1860 Mrs Henry Wood (Ellen Wood): East Lynne . Kessinger Publishing, 2004. ISBN 0192804626 page 29:
  • "What do you think they are going to name the baby? Anne ; after her and her mamma. So very ugly a name!"
    "I don't think so," said Mr Carlyle. "It is simple and unpretending. I like it much. Look at the long, pretentious names in our family - Archibald! Cornelia! And yours, too - Barbara! What a mouthful they all are!"
  • * 1908 Lucy Maud Montgomery: Anne of the Green Gables
  • "But if you call me Anne' please call me ' Anne spelled with an e."
    "What difference does it make how it's spelled?" asked Marilla with another rusty smile as she picked up the teapot.
    "Oh, it makes such'' a difference. It ''looks so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can, and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished."
    Usage notes
    * The popularity of the name originates in the medieval cult of Saint Anne, the apocryphal mother of the Virgin Mary.

    Etymology 2

    A shortened form of any of various Germanic masculine names which began with arn'' (''eagle ), such as Arnold.

    Proper noun

    (en proper noun)
  • .
  • emma

    English

    Proper noun

    (en proper noun)
  • .
  • * 1854 Matthew Hall: The Queens Before the Conquest : page 259-260:
  • Both Saxon and Norman chroniclers unite in representing the youthful Queen Emma as in a peculiar degree gifted with elegance and beauty; so that many flattering epithets had been bestowed on her - as "the Pearl," "the Flower," or "the Fair Maid" of Normandy.
  • * 1917 Carl Van Vechten: Interpreters and Interpretations. A.A.Knopf,1917. page 92:
  • Emma' CalvĂ©...since ''Madame Bovary'' the name '''Emma''' suggests a solid ''bourgeois'' foundation, a country family...' Emma Eames, a chilly name...a wind from the East.
  • * 1980 Barbara Pym: A Few Green Leaves ISBN 0060805498 page 8:
  • The cottage now belonged to Emma''s mother Beatrix, who was a tutor in English literature at a women's college, specialising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. This may have accounted for '''Emma''''s Christian name, for it had seemed to Beatrix unfair to call her daughter Emily, a name associated with her grandmother's servants rather than the author of ''The Wuthering Heights'', so ' Emma had been chosen, perhaps with the hope that some of the qualities possessed by the heroine of the novel might be perpetuated.

    Usage notes

    * Used in England since the Norman Conquest, fashionable in the 19th century, and again in the U.K. from the 1970s to the 1990s, and in the U.S.A. in the 1990s and the 2000s.