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Katherine vs Emma - What's the difference?

katherine | emma |

As a proper noun katherine

is , a popular spelling variant of catherine.

As a noun emma is

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

katherine

English

(Katherine River)

Proper noun

(en proper noun)
  • , a popular spelling variant of Catherine.
  • * 1816 Alexander Chalmers: The General Biographical Dictionary : page 186:
  • SAVAGE (HENRY) - - - His aim was to appear great in little things, and the gravity with which he discusses the origin, derivation, &c of the name Katherine', whether it should be spelt with a K or a C, at which time the letter ''k'' was introduced, and the double ''l'' in Balliol, is truly wonderful. - - - By his wife, Lady Mary Sandys, he left issue Henry, Edwin, John, ' Katherine , and Thomas
  • * 1991 Margaret Atwood: Wilderness Tips ISBN 0385 421060 : page 36:
  • During her childhood she was a romanticized Katherine , dressed by her misty-eyed, fussy mother in dresses that looked like ruffled pillowcases. By high school she'd shed the frills and emerged as a bouncy, round-faced Kathy - - - At university she was Kath, blunt and no-bullshit in her Take-Back-the-Night jeans and checked shirt - - - When she ran away to England, she sliced herself down to Kat. It was economical, street-feline, and pointed as a nail.
  • A placename given to a river and a town in Northern Territory, Australia.
  • 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.