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Helen vs Emma - What's the difference?

helen | emma |

As a proper noun helen

is , a french type variant of helena.

As a noun emma is

(british|dated|wwi|signalese) m in.

helen

English

Proper noun

(s)
  • (Greek mythology) the daughter of Zeus and Leda, considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world; her abduction by Paris brought about the Trojan War.
  • * 1602 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida , Act I, Scene I
  • Fools on both sides! Helen must needs be fair,
    When with your blood you daily paint her thus.
  • .
  • * 1928 , The Mystery of the Blue Train
  • "Is her name Ellen or Helen , Miss Viner? I thought - "
    Miss Viner closed her eyes.
    "I can sound my h's, dear, as well as anyone, but Helen is not a suitable name for a servant. I don't know what the mothers in the lower classes are coming to nowadays."
  • * 1993 , The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien , ISBN 0-14-023028-9, page 6:
  • - - - in 1910 she brought Helen' into the world, the little female, or "''mujercita''", as her mother called all the babies, naming her after the glittery label on a facial ointment, The ' Helen of Troy Beauty Pomade, said to eradicate wrinkles, to soften and add a youthful glow to the user's skin - a fortuitous choice because, of all the sisters, she would be the most beautiful and, never growing old, would always possess the face of a winsome adolescent beauty.
  • * 2003 , A Share in Death'', HarperCollins, ISBN 0060534389, page 189
  • Gemma followed her, thinking that Helen seemed rather an old-fashioned and elegant name for this rumpled young mother.

    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.