Words & WritingGreek → English
Epigraph
/ˈɛpɪɡrɑːf/noun
An inscription on a building or statue, or a short quotation set at the head of a book or chapter.
The Greek roots
ἐπί
epí
upon, on
γραφή
graphḗ
writing, inscription
Literally: “writing on something”
The story of the word
ἐπιγραφή is writing put on a thing: the dedication cut into a statue base, the name on a boundary stone. English used it for inscriptions from the 1620s, and the literary sense of a quotation standing at the head of a chapter is a later extension of the same idea. Epigraphy, the study of ancient inscriptions, supplies most of what is known about the lives of ordinary Greeks, since nobody wrote histories about them.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
epigramepitaphgraphiccalligraphy
In a sentence
The novel opens with an epigraph from Herodotus that the last chapter quietly contradicts.