πυρρίχη

Forms

πυρρίχη (purríkhē) f (genitive πυρρίχης); first declension^[1][2]

Etymology

Beekes and Chantraine take it, with some doubt, from πύρριχος (púrrikhos, “red”), an expressive form of πυρρός (purrhós, “flame-coloured, red”) that Theocritus uses of a bull and that is also a personal name.^[3][4][1] The full name was “pyrrhic dance”, with ὄρχησις (órkhēsis, “dance”) understood.^[5][6]

Ancient writers explained the name in several ways: Aristoxenus and Strabo after an inventor called Πύρριχος (Púrrikhos),^[1] Aristotle from its first performance at the funeral pyre (πυρά (purá)) of Patroclus; others after Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, or from the fiery glint of the dancers' bronze.^[1][7][6]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is first found in Euripides' Andromache, in the plural, of the leaps and twists of Neoptolemus as he fends off missiles at Delphi.^[1][2][8] In Aristophanes it is the war dance itself.^[1][2]

Semantic evolution

The pyrrhic was a dance in hoplite armour that imitated the movements of attack and defence.^[2][7] At Athens it was danced in competition by choruses at the Panathenaea, as Lysias and Isaeus attest, and at Sparta boys learned it from the age of five as training for war.^[7][2] Plato discusses it in the Laws, and inscriptions record it as a prize contest in Asia Minor.^[1][7] Aristophanes coined the phrase “to look a war dance”, that is, to look fierce.^[2][9]

Plutarch uses the word for the dance of the Salii, the Roman priests of Mars.^[2] It was borrowed as Latin pyrrhicha.^[10] From its adjective πυρρίχιος (purríkhios) came the metrical term for a foot of two short syllables.^[1][4] English pyrrhic “war dance” dates from the 1590s, and the metrical sense from the 1620s.^[11]

Timeline

• 5th century BC – Euripides uses the plural for an armed man's leaps and twists under attack.^[1][2]
• 5th–4th century BC – Aristophanes and Xenophon use it for the war dance in armour.^[1][2]
• 5th–4th century BC – Lysias attests choruses dancing it at the Panathenaea.^[7]
• 4th century BC – Aristoxenus derives the name from an inventor called Pyrrichus.^[1]
• 1st–2nd century AD – Plutarch uses it for the dance of the Roman Salii.^[2]
• 1590s – English borrows pyrrhic through Latin.^[11]

Meanings

Noun

1. The pyrrhic, a war dance in armour.^[1][2][5]
2. (in the plural) Leaps and contortions, like those of the dance.^[1][2][12]
3. In πυρρίχην βλέπειν “to look a war dance”: to look fierce or warlike.^[2][1][9]

Word family

• πυρρίχιος (purríkhios)
• πυρριχίζω (purrikhízō)

Related words

• πυρρός (purrhós)
• πύρριχος (púrrikhos)
• Latin pyrrhicha
• English pyrrhic

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
3. ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
4. ^ a b Chantraine, Pierre (2009), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, new ed. with a supplement (Chroniques d'étymologie grecque 1–10), Paris: Klincksieck
5. ^ a b Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert (1889), An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b Pape, Wilhelm (1914), Griechisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 3rd ed., rev. Max Sengebusch, Braunschweig: Vieweg
7. ^ a b c d e Cancik, Hubert; Schneider, Helmuth, eds. (2002–2010), Brill's New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, Leiden: Brill
8. ^ Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
9. ^ a b Woordenboek Grieks/Nederlands (2012–), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, https://woordenboekgrieks.nl
10. ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
11. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
12. ^ Дворецкий, И. Х. (1958), Древнегреческо-русский словарь, Moscow: ГИС