Everyday LifeGreek → English
Hypatia
/haɪˈpeɪʃə/proper noun
A woman's name, carried by the Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher killed in 415.
The Greek roots
ὕπατος
hýpatos
highest, supreme
Literally: “the highest one”
Follow a root:ὕπατος1 word
The story of the word
Hypatia taught Neoplatonic philosophy in Alexandria, edited her father Theon's commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest, and was murdered by a mob during the city's Christian-pagan violence in 415. Her name is the feminine of ὕπατος, highest, the same word Greek speakers used to translate the Roman consul, the highest magistrate. Nothing she wrote survives under her own name; almost everything known about her comes from letters written to her by her student Synesius and from the church historian Socrates Scholasticus.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
In a sentence
The observatory named its lecture series after Hypatia.