A female name. Greek ‘Ελένη, f. of 'Ελενος ‘the bright one’. The wide diffusion of the name is not owing to the fame of the fateful queen of Menelaus, but to Helena (d. a.d. 338), the mother of the Emperor Constantine. Many legends were early attached to her name, such as that of her discovery of the true cross. There are 135 churches dedicated to her in Great Britain. She was said to have been of British origin, the d. of a British king, the Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme. Her name was popular in Celtic countries, especially Wales, from an early date. It was not used in England in the Old English period, but is found (Elena) soon after the Conquest. The common English form of the name has always been Ellen (q.v.), but Helen and Helena came in at the Renaissance. At the present time Helen is probably more common than Ellen. For another development see Eleanor. The Elaine of Arthurian romance is a gallicizing of a Welsh form of Helen. The Irish form Aileen (q.v.) is now often used in England as an independent name. The German pet-form Lena is sometimes also used in England.

HELENA. The former is an English and Scottish shortening of the latter, which is very rare in Scotland. Helena, found also in Spanish and Polish, represents the Greek Helenë (‘Ελένη), the f. of Helenos, literally ‘the bright’ or ‘the light’ from a radical (ele) signifying heat or light: cf. Helios, the sun-god, and Selene, the moon-goddess. The Greek is the most noted of all Greek f. names, since it is that of the ‘fatal beauty’ who, after an adventure in her youth (and before,—she was one of Zeus’s many children), was married to the noble Menelaus, only to be seduced by handsome Paris and carried off to Troy: whence the Trojan War, towards the end of which, on the death of Paris, she married his brother, Deiphobus, and betrayed him to the Greeks. She became reconciled with Menelaus and, according to the most persistent legend, lived happily with him till her or his death; one legend, however, makes her, Menelaus dead, marry Achilles and bear him a son. (Blakeney.) With Aeschylus’s pun on her name (έλένας ‘ship-destroying’) and his ‘Wherefore else this fatal name, That Helen ana destruction are the same’, relate Marlowe’s variation on the ‘femme fatale’ and ‘ship’ themes: ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships,’ etc.; a description known to many who, of poetry, know but this.

HELENA. From the classical name ’Ελενη, signifying a lamp, a torch. Others derive it from ελειν, 2 aor. infin. of αιρεω to take away. The nicknames are Nell, Nelly, Nellie.