Word.ws English Dictionary

millihelen

millihelen noun: a unit of measurement of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

Noun

millihelen (plural millihelens)

  1. (humorous, informal) A unit of measurement of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
    • 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?1983, Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels
    • 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...
    • Years later, I saw "millihelen" in Time, and it wasn't attributed to me, either.1992, Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again

Examples of millihelen in a sentence

  • This is the millihelen: that quantum of beauty required to launch one ship.1993, R. E. Allen, commentator, The Symposium: The Dialogues of Plato volume 2:
  • 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.’2001, Ray Crowther, The Nearest FarAway Place:

Forms of millihelen

pluralmillihelens
alternative formmilli-Helen

Origin of millihelen

From 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".

Questions about millihelen

What does millihelen mean?
Millihelen means a unit of measurement of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
How do you use millihelen in a sentence?
This is the millihelen: that quantum of beauty required to launch one ship.
What part of speech is millihelen?
Millihelen is a noun.
What is the plural of millihelen?
The plural of millihelen is millihelens.

Words near millihelen in the dictionary

  1. milligravity
  2. milligray
  3. milligrays
  4. millihartree
  5. millihartrees
  6. millihelen
  7. millihelens
  8. millihenries
  9. millihenry
  10. millihenrys
  11. millihertz

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: millihelen (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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