Art & MusicGreek → English
Torso
/ˈtɔːrsoʊ/noun
The trunk of the human body, and a statue reduced to that trunk.
The Greek roots
θύρσος
thýrsos
Bacchic wand, plant stalk
Literally: “a stalk, a stump”
Follow a root:θύρσος1 word
The story of the word
A θύρσος was the fennel wand tipped with a pine cone carried by the followers of Dionysus. Latin took it as thyrsus, Italian worn it down to torso in the sense of stalk or stump, and sculptors used that for a broken statue with head and limbs gone. English imported the art term in the eighteenth century and only later applied it to living bodies, so every gym reference to a torso runs back through a wine god's staff.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Italian → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
thyrsustruss
In a sentence
The museum's best piece is a marble torso with both arms missing.
He rotated his torso slowly, the way the physiotherapist had shown him.