millihelen means A unit of measurement of beauty, corresponding to the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.
Why “millihelen” is a great word
A humorous, informal unit of measurement for beauty, defined as the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship. From the combining form milli- ("one thousandth") + Helen, a reference to Helen of Troy, whose legendary beauty was said to have "launched a thousand ships" in Christopher Marlowe's 1604 play Doctor Faustus. Unlike "pulchritude," a formal literary abstraction, or a "standard," an official criterion, the millihelen is a wry, pseudo-scientific reduction of epic cause to manageable metric. It is the faint blush across a train carriage, the glint of sunlight in a lover's hair, the ineffable allure of a half-smile—each moment possessing precisely enough radiance to nudge a single vessel from dock to sea, a measure of how we tame the sublime by insisting it has a number.
Etymology
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".
noun
- 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?”
Words closest in meaning
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