Words & WritingGreek → English
Ode
/oʊd/noun
A formal lyric poem in an elevated register, usually addressed to a person, object or idea.
The Greek roots
ᾠδή
ōidḗ
song, chant
Literally: “song”
Follow a root:ᾠδή17 words
The story of the word
An ōidḗ was simply a song, contracted from aoidḗ, the word Homer uses for what a singer does. Anything sung in Greek carries it somewhere: melody, rhapsody, parody, comedy, and tragedy, the goat song, though what the goat was doing there has never been settled. English took the ode from French in the 1580s, by which time the singing had become a metaphor and the lyre was long gone.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1580s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
melodyparodyrhapsodycomedyprosody
In a sentence
Keats wrote five of the odes in a single spring.
His speech at the retirement dinner turned into an ode to the office kettle.