Art & MusicGreek → English
Mime
/maɪm/noun
Acting that tells a story through gesture and movement without speech.
The Greek roots
μῖμος
mîmos
imitator, actor
Literally: “imitator”
Follow a root:μῖμος4 words
The story of the word
A μῖμος in Greece was both the performer and the piece: short spoken sketches of ordinary life, frequently obscene, closer to a sitcom than to anything silent. Rome imported the form, Latin mimus carried it, and English took the word in the seventeenth century. Silence attached to it only through nineteenth-century French practice; nothing in the Greek suggests a closed mouth.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
pantomimemimicmimesismimeograph
In a sentence
He trained as a mime in Paris before he ever spoke a line on stage.
She mimed pouring a drink and the whole room understood.