What's the difference between
and
Enter two words to compare and contrast their definitions, origins, and synonyms to better understand how those words are related.

Pulchritude vs Millihelen - What's the difference?

pulchritude | millihelen |

As nouns the difference between pulchritude and millihelen

is that pulchritude is physical beauty while millihelen is (informal) a unit of measure of pulchritude, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

pulchritude

English

Noun

(-)
  • Physical beauty.
  • * 1978 , Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty, Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations , NASA Special Publication 4204, 1978, ch. 4 [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch4-8.html]
    • One participant recalls arriving at his Cocoa Beach motel on a Saturday evening with the Miss Universe contest on TV. To his wife's amazement, his interest in feminine pulchritude gave way to fatigue, and he was asleep before the final selection.
  • * 1979 , , 00:18:20
    • Do you know why a woman of such pulchritude is married to me? 'Cause I make a comfortable living.

    Synonyms

    * comeliness

    Derived terms

    * pulchritudinous

    millihelen

    English

    Noun

    (s)
  • (informal) A unit of measure of pulchritude, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
  • *1983 : Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
  • *:Now Maria seems to me to be a wonder in every respect that I have had the pleasure of examining, and her clothes are plainly not meant to conceal defects. So what do we say? I'd say 850 millihelens for Maria. anybody bid higher?
  • *1992 : Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again
  • *:During the days when I was a graduate student in the early forties, we were dealing with chemistry in which there were a great many units used in measuring various quantities--in particular the entire metric system. A friend of mine, Mario Castillo, and I therefore whiled away one lunch period by making up units and I finally came up with the "millihelen ," which is enough beauty to launch one ship. (After all, Helen of Troy had a "face that launched a thousand ships.")
  • *:Years later, I saw "millihelen " in ''Time'', and it wasn't attributed to me, either.
  • *1993 : R. E. Allen, commentator, The Symposium: The Dialogues of Plato volume 2
  • *:The finest achievement of modern aesthetic theory has been the discovery of a unit of measure of beauty. This is the millihelen: that quantum of beauty required to launch one ship. But the millihelen is an inappropriate measure of beauty in the ascent passage of the ''Symposium'', for application of a measure implies invariance in what is measured, ''[...]'' So there is no number of millihelens by which Socrates' soul is prettier than Helen of Troy's body .
  • *1994 : Carl Pollard, Ivan A. Sag, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
  • *:three milliHelens more beautiful
  • *2001 : Ray Crowther, The Nearest FarAway Place
  • *:Don was referring to the time at school when Carl had first dated Sarah. ‘She was the best looking girl in the school — at least nine hundred millihelens . ’
  • *2005 : David Morgan-Mar
  • *:(Mercutio, in reaction to the mention of the millihelen ) 'You can't mix metric prefixes with Troy units like that.'

    • Usage notes

    According to Raymond Augustine Bauer and Kenneth J. Gergen (The Study of Policy Formation'', 1968 ), ‘''one could also speak of fractional millihelens, say, enough beauty to launch two cabin boys ’.