Myth & LegendGreek → English
Panpipe
/ˈpænpaɪp/noun
A wind instrument of tuned pipes bound side by side and blown across the open ends.
The Greek roots
Πάν
Pán
Pan, god of flocks
Literally: “Pan's pipe”
Follow a root:πᾶν19 words
The story of the word
Pan chased the nymph Syrinx to a riverbank, where she turned into reeds; he cut the reeds and bound them, and the instrument is what he had left of her. Her name, σῦριγξ, is the ordinary Greek word for the pipes, and medicine took it for the syringe and for a fistula. Pan's other gift to English is panic, the groundless terror that seizes flocks and armies in lonely places at noon, and it has nothing to do with the πᾶν that means all.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
panicsyrinxsyringe
In a sentence
A boy was playing panpipes at the top of the steps for coins.
The panpipe is easy to sound and hard to play in tune.