Words & WritingGreek → English
Topos
/ˈtɒpɒs/noun
A stock theme or turn of argument that recurs across a literature; in category theory, a category behaving like a universe of sheaves.
The Greek roots
τόπος
tópos
place
Literally: “place”
Follow a root:τόπος11 words
The story of the word
Greek rhetoric taught students to keep arguments in mental places, koinoì tópoi, which Latin rendered as loci communes and English flattened into commonplace. Ernst Robert Curtius revived the singular in 1948 for the recurring figures of European letters: the world grown old, the impossible task, the book as a voyage. Grothendieck then took the identical noun for something wholly unrelated in 1960s algebraic geometry, so the two topoi never meet.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
topictopographyutopiaisotope
In a sentence
The reluctant hero is such a worn topos that subverting it has become a topos too.