Words & WritingGreek → English
Georgic
/ˈdʒɔːrdʒɪk/noun
A poem about farming and the labour of the land, or the mode such poems belong to.
The Greek roots
γῆ
gê
earth, land
ἔργον
érgon
work
Literally: “earth work”
The story of the word
Virgil finished his four books of Georgics around 29 BC, covering crops, vines, cattle and bees, and readers took them for two millennia as an agricultural manual as well as verse. Eighteenth-century England ran a georgic boom, producing entire poems on cider and on sheep-shearing. The same compound is the name George: geōrgós, the man who works the earth.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
Georgegeographygeologyergonomics
In a sentence
The poem is a georgic in everything but subject, since the crop being tended is code.