entry
emma
/ˈɛmə/A female given name; also British enunciation of -m-
From German Emma (female given name).
from German Emma
from German Emma
from German Emma
Word Ancestry
from German Emma
from German Emma
from German Emma
A name that began life as plain old Emma somehow ended up helping British operators spell out letters over crackly wires. By 1891, people were using a little spoken e for the letter m, and in the trenches of World War I that gave rise to tidy time-tags like ack emma for a.m. and pip emma for p.m. The funny part is that this has nothing to do with the feminine name Emma except the accident of spelling and sound, but it stuck because radio and telephone speech needed every syllable to behave. It sits in the same scrappy wartime world as ack, pip, and toc — little vocal signals made to survive static, distance, and shouting. So tomorrow, if you see emma in this old British sense, hear not a girl’s name but a letter being marched into line.
The Story
A name that began life as plain old Emma somehow ended up helping British operators spell out letters over crackly wires. By 1891, people were using a little spoken e for the letter m, and in the trenches of World War I that gave rise to tidy time-tags like ack emma for a.m. and pip emma for p.m. The funny part is that this has nothing to do with the feminine name Emma except the accident of spelling and sound, but it stuck because radio and telephone speech needed every syllable to behave. It sits in the same scrappy wartime world as ack, pip, and toc — little vocal signals made to survive static, distance, and shouting. So tomorrow, if you see emma in this old British sense, hear not a girl’s name but a letter being marched into line.
Kin & Kindred
From 'Emma'·female given name, from a longer Germanic name
Derived Terms
English words from this root