Entry № 11754 · Russian origin

Yelena Yelena — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ yeh-LEH-nah /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Russian
Meaning
"Bright, shining light"
Syllables
3
First recorded
Medieval (Russian)

A name that means "bright, shining light".

Yelena is the Russian form of Helen, from the Greek for the bright or shining one — a torch of a name. It has a graceful, flowing sound and centuries of elegance behind it.

Luminous and refined, Yelena is Helen with a Russian glow.

Shining light — the Russian Helen.

The name in its native script.

Елена
Transliteration
Yelena
Pronunciation
/ jəˈlɛn.ə /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Yelena stands.

Yelena 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.

Yelenas before her.

Real people
Yelena Bonner
Soviet human rights activist.
1923 – 2011
In fiction
Yelena Belova
Marvel's Black Widow.
Marvel Comics

Names connected to Yelena.

The number behind Yelena.

8

The Visionary

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Yelena reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.