Entry № 4219 · French origin

Henrietta Henrietta — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ HEN-ree-eh-tah /
Gender
Girl
Origin
French
Meaning
"Ruler of the home (Henrietta Lacks, the HeLa cells)"
Syllables
3
First recorded
Medieval (French)

A name that means "ruler of the home (henrietta lacks, the hela cells)".

Henrietta is the French feminine diminutive of Henry — Old Germanic haim (home) + ric (power, ruler).

Ruler of the home. Her HeLa cells, taken without consent in 1951, are in 75,000 studies and made the polio vaccine.

The name in its native script.

Henrietta
Transliteration
Henrietta
Pronunciation
/ ˌhɛn.riˈɛt.ə /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Henrietta stands.

Henrietta does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.

Henriettas before her.

Real people
Henrietta Lacks
Source of the HeLa cell line.
1920 – 1951
Henrietta Swan Leavitt
American astronomer.
1868 – 1921
In fiction
Henrietta
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
2010

Names connected to Henrietta.

The number behind Henrietta.

1

The Leader

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Henrietta reduce to 1, The Leader. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.