Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Polis
/ˈpɒlɪs/noun
A Greek city-state, understood as its citizens as much as its territory.
The Greek roots
πόλις
pólis
city, city-state
Literally: “city, citizen body”
Follow a root:πόλις11 words
The story of the word
A polis was the people, not the walls. Thucydides has Nicias tell his beaten army that men make the city, and Greek writers say the Athenians where English says Athens. Aristotle's line that a human is a πολιτικὸν ζῷον means an animal built to live in a polis, which is a narrower and stranger claim than political animal suggests. Police and policy both descend from the same word through Latin politia.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
metropoliscosmopolitanpoliticspoliceacropolis
In a sentence
Sparta was a polis without much of a city.
Historians count over a thousand separate poleis in the Greek world.