The name Helena is the Latin variant of the Greek name Helene, probably meaning ‘torch’, ‘light’ or ‘moon’.
Helena is a female first name.
The name Helena isn’t among the current fashionable names in our top 10 stats, but nonetheless, it’s still very popular and common. In our SmartGenius ranking of all girls names, Helena ranks 470. Recently, out of every 10,000 newborn girls, approximately 4 were named Helena. In the entire USA, approximately 29,215 people – children, adults and seniors – currently bear the name Helena. That is 0.01 % of all living Americans.
The name Helena is the Latin variant of the Greek name Helene, probably meaning ‘torch’, ‘light’ or ‘moon’.
The name Helena is... known in many European languages, including German, Swedish, Polish and Croatian.
For more than 140 years, parents decide to name their daughter Helena annualy. This means that there have been girls named Helena who witnessed the first Labor Day parade in the U.S. or followed Albert Einstein's career. The name has 'always been there', but never ranked in the top 100, and thus women named Helena have consistently been special. The name was particularly popular a long time ago in the 19th century. In one particular year, long before the first passenger flight and even before there was the first real radio, parents liked Helena even more than any other time: in 1881, it holds its present record of rank #190 in the list of the most popular girls' names.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Helena was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
Helena has never been ranked higher than #190. In 2022, she rivaled the 435 names that preceded her on the list. In total, 668 girls named Helena were born in that year. For comparison: 30 years earlier, in 1992, when possibly the parents of the now very young Helena were born, there have been 187 newborns who received this name.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter H is quite rare as a first letter for girls' names: only 1.7% of all common girls' names in the US begin with H. The most common first letters of girls' names, by the way, are A, S and M, while U, X and Q are the least common initials of girls' names.
With six letters, the name Helena is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
Therefore: As 1.7% of all girls' names begin with an H, this initial letter is less common than the other letters on average. Interesting detail: of all the names that begin with an H, Helen is the most common.
If your name is Helena and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Helena, you can simply say:
Hat
Elephant
Lion
Elephant
Nut
Apple
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Helena
Helena
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
H
E
L
E
N
A
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
H
E
L
E
N
A
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Helena sounds like this:
