Entry № 2785 · Irish origin

Eileen Eileen — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ eye-LEEN /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Irish
Meaning
"Light (Eileen Gray, architect; Eileen Chang)"
Syllables
2
First recorded
Medieval (Irish)

A name that means "light (eileen gray, architect; eileen chang)".

Eileen is the anglicized Irish Eibhlín — a Gaelic form of Helen, from the Greek hēlē (sun, light).

Subject of Peter Adam's Eileen Gray: Architect/Designer (1987).

Light (Eileen Gray, architect; Eileen Chang) — a Irish name.

The name in its native script.

Eibhlín
Transliteration
Eibhlín
Pronunciation
/ aɪˈliːn /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Eileen stands.

Eileen 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.

Eileens before her.

Real people
Eileen Gray
Anglo-Irish Modernist architect.
1878 – 1976
Eileen Chang
Chinese-American novelist.
1920 – 1995
In fiction
Eileen
Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen.
2015

Names connected to Eileen.

The number behind Eileen.

5

The Seeker

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Eileen reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.