"millihelen" meaning in All languages combined

See millihelen on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: millihelens [plural]
Etymology: milli- + Helen, referring to Helen of Troy, the maiden so beautiful that her abduction by Paris sparked the Trojan War and was said, in Christopher Marlowe's 1604 Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, to have "launched a thousand ships". Etymology templates: {{prefix|en|milli<id:thousandth>|Helen}} milli- + Helen Head templates: {{en-noun}} millihelen (plural millihelens)
  1. (informal, humorous) A unit of measure of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. Wikipedia link: Helen of Troy, Trojan War Tags: humorous, informal Synonyms: milli-Helen

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for millihelen meaning in All languages combined (3.5kB)

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        "1": "en",
        "2": "milli<id:thousandth>",
        "3": "Helen"
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      "expansion": "milli- + Helen",
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  ],
  "etymology_text": "milli- + Helen, referring to Helen of Troy, the maiden so beautiful that her abduction by Paris sparked the Trojan War and was said, in Christopher Marlowe's 1604 Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, to have \"launched a thousand ships\".",
  "forms": [
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  "senses": [
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          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1983, Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels",
          "text": "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?",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1992, Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again",
          "text": "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.\")\nYears later, I saw \"millihelen\" in Time, and it wasn't attributed to me, either.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1993, R. E. Allen, commentator, The Symposium: The Dialogues of Plato volume 2",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1994, Carl Pollard, Ivan A. Sag, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar",
          "text": "three milliHelens more beautiful",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001, Ray Crowther, The Nearest FarAway Place",
          "text": "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.’",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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        "A unit of measure of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship."
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        "(informal, humorous) A unit of measure of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship."
      ],
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          "word": "milli-Helen"
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  "forms": [
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  "lang_code": "en",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1983, Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels",
          "text": "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?",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1992, Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again",
          "text": "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.\")\nYears later, I saw \"millihelen\" in Time, and it wasn't attributed to me, either.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "1993, R. E. Allen, commentator, The Symposium: The Dialogues of Plato volume 2",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "1994, Carl Pollard, Ivan A. Sag, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar",
          "text": "three milliHelens more beautiful",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2001, Ray Crowther, The Nearest FarAway Place",
          "text": "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.’",
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      ],
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        "(informal, humorous) A unit of measure of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship."
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  "synonyms": [
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      "word": "milli-Helen"
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  "word": "millihelen"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-06-04 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (e9e0a99 and db5a844). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.