Myth & LegendGreek → English
Sisyphean
/ˌsɪsɪˈfiːən/adjective
Endlessly laborious and certain to come to nothing.
The Greek roots
Σίσυφος
Sísyphos
Sisyphus, king of Corinth
Literally: “of Sisyphus”
Follow a root:Σίσυφος1 word
The story of the word
Odyssey 11 puts him at the boulder, heaving it up the slope while it rolls back every time. Ancient sources cannot agree on the crime: cheating death twice, or informing on Zeus over the abduction of Aegina. Camus finished his 1942 essay by instructing the reader to imagine Sisyphus happy, which turned a punishment into a working philosophy of persistence.
- 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
Weeding the allotment in August is Sisyphean; whatever you pull comes back by Friday.