Myth & LegendGreek → English
Procrustean
/prəˈkrʌstiən/adjective
Forcing things into a fixed standard regardless of what the fitting destroys.
The Greek roots
Προκρούστης
Prokroústēs
the stretcher, hammerer-out
Literally: “belonging to the one who hammers things out to length”
Follow a root:Προκρούστης1 word
The story of the word
The bandit on the road to Athens offered travellers a bed and then made them fit it, racking the short ones and cutting down the tall, until Theseus put him in his own bed. Prokroustēs is a nickname built on a verb for beating metal out to length; other sources call the man Damastes or Polypemon. English picked the adjective up in the seventeenth century for one-size-fits-all cruelty, and it has never needed updating.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
Grading every department on one procrustean scale flattered the big teams and punished the small.