Art & MusicGreek → English
Obelisk
/ˈɒbəlɪsk/noun
A tall four-sided stone shaft that tapers to a pyramid at the top.
The Greek roots
ὀβελίσκος
obelískos
little spit, skewer
Literally: “small roasting spit”
Follow a root:ὀβελίσκος1 word
The story of the word
ὀβελός was a cooking spit and ὀβελίσκος its diminutive, a little skewer. Greeks living in Egypt looked at the tapering granite shafts of the pharaohs and called them small spits, which is how monuments weighing three hundred tonnes ended up named for kitchen equipment. Alexandrian scholars also drew an obelos, a horizontal skewer, in the margin beside lines of Homer they suspected were fakes, and that editorial mark is the ancestor of the printer's dagger.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1560s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
obelusobelize
In a sentence
The obelisk in the square came out of Egypt in 1878 and has been weathering badly ever since.