Variant of Selena, from the Greek goddess of the moon, meaning 'moon.'
Celena is a softly variant spelling of Selena, rooted in the ancient Greek Selene — the goddess of the full moon who drove her silver chariot across the night sky each evening. In Greek cosmology Selene was distinct from Artemis, goddess of the hunt; Selene was pure lunar embodiment, and her name derives from the word for light and brightness.
She was said to fall helplessly in love with the sleeping shepherd Endymion, watching over him eternally on a Carian hillside — making her a figure of devoted, longing beauty. The name entered European usage through Latin and gradually spread across Romance-language cultures, where it took numerous forms: Celine in French, Selena in Spanish and English, and Celena as a graceful orthographic variant that softens the name's beginning with a more obviously "C" spelling. The French chanteuse Céline Dion brought a cognate form to global pop-cultural visibility in the 1990s, while Selena Quintanilla-Pérez — the beloved Queen of Tejano music whose life was cut tragically short in 1995 — gave the root name an enduring emotional legacy in Latin American and American communities.
Celena's particular spelling creates a slightly more formal, romantic register than the more common Selena, evoking both the celestial and the classical without feeling overwrought. It has been quietly used for generations by parents who wanted something luminous and distinctive but not invented, a name with ancient bones dressed in an elegant modern silhouette.