hellä

hellä is a Finnish adjective meaning gentle, soft, or tender. It describes qualities of people, touches, sounds, or atmospheres that convey warmth and kindness. The term is common in everyday speech and literature, and it can function both attributively before a noun and predicatively after a linking verb.

Usage examples include hellä kosketus (“a tender touch”) and hellä ääni (“a soft/ gentle voice”). Predicative use can occur with the verb on, as in Käsi on hellä (“The hand is gentle”). The adverbial form is hellästi, meaning tenderly or gently. Like other Finnish adjectives, hellä can take comparative and superlative forms through regular inflection to express degrees of gentleness, depending on the grammar of the sentence.

Name usage and form: Hellä is a Finnish feminine given name derived from the adjective, carrying the sense of gentleness. The name is relatively uncommon but appears in Finnish personal-name records and literature. In general text, hellä remains the lowercase common word, while Hellä is used when the name is written with initial capital, as is standard for proper nouns.

Related notes: The word can appear in compounds and idioms where warmth or mildness is emphasized. Its usage is versatile across everyday speech, poetry, and prose, and it often conveys a positive, comforting connotation in Finnish.