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As Chrisell said it could ahve been misspelt by the registar, maybe their Swedish accents made it difficult for the nurse to understand (assuming your mother was bron in an English speaking country).

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Another possiblitiy is that it was suppose to be Elinor and the registars o's and a's looked a like, so when retyped as many are mistake are made, for instance int he 1891 census in England my relatives last names are Hurt not Hunt like in the census prior and after, so we assume that the typed version was a mistprint due to inability to read the handwriting.

The Swedish version of Eleanor/Elenore is Elinor. Maybe they misspelled that on the birth certificate?

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Lass

It's very common, particularly for people who were born in the first half of the 1900s, to see that their first name was misspelled, or spelled differently to how their parents intended it, on the birth certificate. This occurs for a huge range of reasons. It's quite possible that your grandparents had a nurse fill in the birth certificate for them, and when they said "Elenore" (without spelling it out) the nurse wrote "Elinar".

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Either way, it'll have the same derivation as Ellen / Elin, all the spellings of Eleanor, all of which are based on Helen.

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