Myth & LegendGreek → English
Halcyon
/ˈhælsiən/adjective
Calm and peaceful, and of a past period, idyllically happy.
The Greek roots
ἀλκυών
alkyṓn
kingfisher
Literally: “kingfisher”
Follow a root:ἀλκυών1 word
The story of the word
The Greeks believed the kingfisher nested on the open sea around the winter solstice and that the waves lay flat for fourteen days while it brooded. Those are the halcyon days, a fortnight of calm in the worst month of the year. Ovid tells the version where Alcyone throws herself into the sea after her drowned husband Ceyx and both are turned into birds. The h at the front is an error: someone connected the bird to ἅλς, sea, and κύω, to conceive, and the false spelling survived through Latin into English.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- late 14th century
In a sentence
He talks about the halcyon days before the second child arrived.
Two halcyon weeks in September, and then the rain set in.