Etymology

Usage notes

• Used in England since the Norman Conquest, fashionable in the 19th century, and back in favor today.

Quotations

• 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 Calvé...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.

Proper noun

1. of Germanic origin.

Proper noun

1. of Germanic origin.