Art & MusicGreek → English
Anthem
/ˈænθəm/noun
A song adopted by a nation or group as its own, or a choral setting of a sacred text.
The Greek roots
ἀντί
antí
against, in return
φωνή
phōnḗ
voice, sound
Literally: “sounding in answer”
The story of the word
Ἀντίφωνα were verses sung by two halves of a choir answering each other, the ancestor of the antiphon. Old English took the church Latin antiphona as antefn, and centuries of English mouths wore it down to anthem, so far from the original that antiphon had to be borrowed again later as a separate word. The national sense is only nineteenth-century.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old English → English
- First recorded
- Old English
Same family
antiphonphoneticsymphonytelephone
In a sentence
The crowd sang the anthem a semitone under the band and nobody minded.