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Nellie

proper nounattested in dialogue

A diminutive of the female given names Eleanor, Ellen, Helen, or Chanel; popular as a formal given name at the turn of the 20th century.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A diminutive of the female given names Eleanor, Ellen, Helen, or Chanel; popular as a formal given name at the turn of the 20th century.

    "Then we will call her Matilda," said he, "as it is a maxim of mine never to spoil children by giving them pet names." "But you call your daughter Nellie," suggested the little widow, and in her soft, blue eye there shone a mischievous twinkle, as if she fancied she had beaten him in his own argument. - - - "That is sister Kelsey's idea, and as she is very fond of Nellie I do not interfere.

    "Eleanor, that's kind of an old lady name. I like Nellie better. Nellie Kincaid, that's got a nice ring to it. It sounds like you're a singer or something.

  2. 2

    rareA diminutive of the female given name Chanel.

  3. 3

    rareA diminutive of the male given name Nelson.

Etymology

Suffixed with -ie, compare Noll and Neddie, respectively from Oliver and Edward.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).