Art & MusicGreek → English
Pantheon
/ˈpænθiɒn/noun
A temple to all the gods, the full set of a people's gods, or a group of the most admired figures in a field.
The Greek roots
πᾶν
pân
all, every
θεός
theós
god
Literally: “of all the gods”
The story of the word
Agrippa built the Roman one and Hadrian rebuilt it; it stands roofed and whole today because it was handed over as a church in 609, which spared it the quarrying that took the rest. The sense of all the gods of a people arrived in English in the seventeenth century. The sense of an honoured group came in the nineteenth, by which point the word needed no gods at all.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
pantheismtheologyatheistpanorama
In a sentence
The dome of the Pantheon is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome anywhere.
She belongs in the pantheon of post-war photographers.