Words & WritingGreek → English
Epilogue
/ˈɛpɪlɒɡ/noun
A closing section that tells what happened after the main story ended.
The Greek roots
ἐπί
epí
upon, in addition
λόγος
lógos
speech, words
Literally: “words added on”
The story of the word
In Aristotle's Rhetoric the epílogos is the last part of a speech, where the speaker recalls what he proved and then works on the jury's feelings. Athenian drama used the word for a closing address, often by a god tidying up the aftermath. English took it in the 1400s and the theatre gave it to an actor speaking directly to the audience, which is what Rosalind does at the end of As You Like It. Novels adopted it for the chapter that tells you who married whom.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
prologuemonologueepigramepidemic
In a sentence
The epilogue jumps forward twenty years and undoes most of the ending.