acephalous

From French acéphale, from Ancient Greek ἀκέφαλος (aképhalos, “headless”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + κεφαλή (kephalḗ, “head”). By surface analysis, a- +‎ -cephalous.

• IPA^(key): /əˈsɛfələs/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

acephalous (comparative more acephalous, superlative most acephalous)

1. Having no head.

   Synonyms: acephalic, headless

   • 1792, Walter Vaughan, An Essay, Philosophical and Medical, Concerning Modern Clothing‎, Rochester, pages 58–59:

     […] Mr. Cruickshank saw a Monster nine Months old, which lived thirty-six Hours after it was born, though it had no Cranium: […] But is this a Reason that we should believe the vital Functions and the Increase of the Body have no dependence on the Brain? I think not: for such acephalous Subjects never live long […]

   • 1916, Don Marquis, “The Little Group Gives a Pagan Masque”, in Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers‎, New York: Appleton, page 164:

     “But tell me, my Dea—my Psyche!—
     (With your wings outspread as to race
     With that swift and acephalous Nike
     Who lost her bean somewhere in Thrace)—

2. (zoology, applied to bivalve mollusks) Without a distinct head.
3. (botany) Having the style spring from the base, instead of from the apex, as is the case in certain ovaries
5. (social sciences, political science, sociology) A system of society without centralised state authority, where power is welded amongst groups of community entities e.g. clans. Without a leader or chief.

   Synonyms: acephalic, leaderless

   an acephalous society / community

   • 1685, Louis Maimbourg, chapter 25, in Archibald Lovell, transl., An Historical Treatise of the Foundation and Prerogatives of the Church of Rome and of Her Bishops‎, London: Jos. Hindmarsh, pages 318–319:

     […] an Oecumenical Council is a whole, and a Body whereof the Pope, or he that presides in it in his place, is the Head[.] For there is no Acephalous Council, as M. Schelstrate speaks, that is to say, without a Head, calling that of Constance so in the Absence of the Pope.

   • 1870, Richard Francis Burton, Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay‎, London: Tinsley Brothers, Introductory Essay, p. 54:

     A very brief acephalous interim followed the death of the dark Dictator.

6. (prosody) Deficient in the beginning, as a line of poetry that is missing its expected opening syllable.

   Synonym: acephalic

   • 1746, Claude Lancelot, translated by T. Nugent, A New Method of Learning with Greater Facility the Greek Tongue‎, London: J. Nourse and G. Hawkins, Volume 2, Book 9, p. 348:

     They have acephalous or headless Verses, which commence with a short Syllable instead of a long one:

   • 1934, Robert Swann, Frank Sidgwick, chapter 2, in The Making of Verse: A Guide to English Metres‎, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, page 16:

     Sometimes verse lines “jump” the first syllable (in anapaestic and dactylic measures the first two syllables) of a regular metre. Such lines are said to be acephalous (headless) or, as acrostic writers would put it, “beheaded.”

7. Lacking the first portion of the text. (of a manuscript)

   Synonym: acephalic

   Coordinate terms: acaudal, atelous

8. (rare) Without a beginning.
   • 1828, Thomas de Quincey, review of Elements of Rhetoric by Richard Whately, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 24, No. 147, December 1828, p. 905,

     Men wrote eloquently, because they wrote feelingly: they wrote idiomatically, because they wrote naturally, and without affectation: but if a false or acephalous structure of sentence,—if a barbarous idiom—or an exotic word happened to present itself, no writer of the 17th century seems to have had any such scrupulous sense of the dignity belonging to his own language, as should make it a duty to reject it, or worth his while to re-model a line.

• acephalously