Jump to content

epimyth

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

[edit]

Etymology

[edit]

From Greek ἐπιμύθιον, neutral of ἐπιμύθιος, from ἐπί ‘upon’ + μῦθος ‘story, fable’.

Pronunciation

[edit]

Noun

[edit]

epimyth (plural epimyths)

  1. The moral of a story.
    • 1881, William Fleming, Henry Calderwood, A Vocabulary of the Philosophical Sciences, page 664:
      The epimyth, coming after the fable, the moral.
    • 1934, Daniele Vare, The Quarterly Review, page 448:
      [I]t is the Odyssean episode with a Christian epimyth.
    • 1994, Reb Moshe Walich, Book of Fables: The Yiddish Fable Collection of Reb Moshe Wallich, Frankfurt Am Main, 1697, page 19:
      In principle each fable in the collection is divided into two parts: the narrative itself, followed by an explicit moral or epimyth.
      ...
      In most of the fables the length of the epimyth ranges between six and twelve lines.
    • 2000, Edward W. Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: medieval education, Chaucer and his followers, page 227:
      [P]resumably the “man of education” did not reproduce the epimyth of the fable, which warns that one should always anticipate the result of one's actions.
    • 2004, Jerold C. Frakes, Early Yiddish Texts 1100-1750: With Introduction and Commentary, page 750:
      [T]he first five fables follow a different sequence in the two texts, which causes a logical problem in the epimyth to fable no. 6 in Wallich's collection; and tale no. 35 from the earlier collection is omitted by Moses Wallich.
[edit]