Words & WritingGreek → English
Epic
/ˈɛpɪk/noun
A long narrative poem about heroic deeds, or anything on a vast scale.
The Greek roots
ἔπος
épos
word, song, verse
Literally: “made of verse-words”
Follow a root:ἔπος1 word
The story of the word
ἔπος is any spoken word; the plural ἔπη came to mean lines of hexameter, Homer's metre, and ἐπικὴ ποίησις the poetry built out of them. English used epic as an adjective for two centuries before letting it stand alone as a noun. Its recent life as a slang superlative for anything impressive is less of a break than it looks: the Greek term was always a claim about scale.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
eposorthoepy
In a sentence
The Kalevala is the national epic and almost nobody has read it through.
Getting four children out of the house was an epic in itself.