parody

Etymology

It is borrowed from Late Latin parōdia, found in post-classical Latin from the 4th century and earlier as a Greek word in classical Latin,^[2][3][4] from Ancient Greek παρῳδία (parōidía, “a burlesque song or poem”),^[2][5][3][6] made of παρά (pará, “beside, parallel to”) (see para-) and ᾠδή (ōidḗ, “song, ode”),^[2][3][7][8] a word related to ἀείδω (aeídō, “to sing”) and the source of ode.^[4][7] Klein takes it through parodie,^[9] which the OED records in French only from 1615.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

A literary composition that imitates another work, especially one that copies an author's style and themes for comic effect: 1607, in Thomas Walkington's The Optick Glasse of Humors.^[2][4] Barnhart and Etymonline find it earlier, in 1598, in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour.^[3][5]

Semantic evolution

Johnson (1755) defined a parody as a kind of writing in which an author's words or thoughts are taken and, by a slight change, adapted to a new purpose.^[10] From 1730 the word was used without an article for the genre itself.^[2] The verb is recorded from 1733, in a letter of Pope;^[2][4] Barnhart dates it to before 1745 and Etymonline to 1745.^[3][5] Its general sense, to imitate someone or something in a mocking way, appears from 1801, in Southey's Thalaba.^[2][5] The weakened noun sense, a poor or feeble imitation, a travesty, is recorded from Coleridge (a1834);^[2][11] the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins dates it to the mid 19th century.^[12] In music, a parody is a composition that reuses material from another piece, with serious intent.^[13]

Timeline

• 1598 – Barnhart's and Etymonline's first date, in Ben Jonson.^[3][5]
• 1607 – a comic imitation of a literary work.^[2][4]
• 1730 – parody as a genre.^[2]
• 1733 – verb, to write a parody of.^[2][4]
• 1781 – verb, intransitive, to compose parodies (now rare).^[2]
• 1801 – verb, to mimic for comic or mocking effect.^[2][5]
• a1834 – a feeble imitation, a travesty.^[2]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. A piece of writing, music, film or other work that imitates the style of another work, author or genre with deliberate exaggeration, for comic effect or in ridicule.
2. The writing of such works, as a form of art.
3. Something so badly done that it seems to mock what it should be; a travesty: The hearing was a parody of justice.
4. (music) A composition that reworks material from another piece, with serious intent.

Verb

1. To make a parody of a work, an author or a style: The sketch parodied a famous detective series.
2. To imitate someone or something in a mocking way.

Word family

• parodic
• parodist
• parodistic
• parodiable

Related words

• ode
• prosody
• rhapsody
• travesty
• burlesque
• satire

Usage notes

Dictionary.com compares parody with burlesque, caricature and satire in its synonym studies.^[14] A different, obsolete parody, a period of time or the end of life, used only by Chaucer and Lydgate, is a variant of period.^[2] The OED notes that Bailey's dictionary (1730) defined parody as a popular maxim or proverb, apparently by mistake.^[2]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
10. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
11. ^ Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)
12. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
13. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
14. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House