Myth & LegendGreek → English
Amazon
/ˈæməzɒn/noun
One of the warrior women of Greek legend, and by extension any tall, powerful woman.
The Greek roots
Ἀμαζών
Amazṓn
Amazon, warrior woman
Literally: “without a breast”
Follow a root:Ἀμαζών1 word
The story of the word
Greek writers explained the name as ἀ- plus μαζός, breastless, and told a story of girls searing off the right breast to clear the bowstring; no surviving Greek art shows it, and philologists now treat the explanation as a guess at a foreign name, probably Iranian. Herodotus reports that the Scythians called them Oiorpata, man-killers. The South American river took the name in the 1540s, after Francisco de Orellana's crew reported being attacked by women on its banks.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
The vase shows Achilles killing an Amazon and regretting it in the same moment.