Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word
chiasmus. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
chiasmus, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
chiasmus in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
chiasmus you have here. The definition of the word
chiasmus will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition of
chiasmus, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
English
Etymology
From Latin chiasmus, from Ancient Greek χιασμός (khiasmós), from χιάζω (khiázō, “to mark with a chi”), from χ (kh, “chi”).
Pronunciation
Noun
chiasmus (countable and uncountable, plural chiasmi or chiasmuses)
Examples
|
- To stop too fearful, and too faint to go
- Oliver Goldsmith, "The Traveller"
- haec queritur, stupet haec (this woman complains, this one gapes)
- Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 1.124.
- Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
- Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat.
- Attributed to Socrates; repeated by Cicero
|
- (rhetoric) An inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases.
1934, H. H. Walker, N. W. Lund, “The Literary Structure of the Book of Habakkuk”, in Journal of Biblical Literature, 53 (4): 355:The book of Habakkuk has been discovered to consist of a closely knit chiastic structure throughout. This is the first poem of such length to stand revealed as a literary unit of this kind, though chiasmus has already been discovered throughout many psalms […]
1984, Ethel Grodzins Romm, “Persuasive Writing”, in American Bar Association Journal, 70: 158:John F. Kennedy is more famous for his chiasmus than for many of his policies:
"Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."
2002, Simon R. Slings, “Figures of Speech in Aristophanes”, in Andreas Willi, editor, The Language of Greek Comedy, pages 103–104:Leeman therefore holds that chiasmus is the basic order in Greek and Latin: antithesis is, he claims, normal for the modern, rational mind, but for the Greeks and Romans chiasmus was more natural.
2009, Seyed Ghahreman Safavi, Simon Weightman, Rūmī's Mystical Design: Reading the Mathnawī, Book One, page 46:The realization that Mawlānā was using parallelism and chiasmus to organize the higher levels of his work has been a major surprise.
Synonyms
Derived terms
Translations
(rhetoric) an inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases
Further reading