ACROSTIC • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Acrostic

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noun

Acrostic n.

A composition, usually in verse, in which the first or the last letters of the lines, or certain other letters, taken in order, form a name, word, phrase, or motto.

A Hebrew poem in which the lines or stanzas begin with the letters of the alphabet in regular order (as Psalm cxix.). See Abecedarian.

Double acrostic, a species of enigma, in which words are to be guessed whose initial and final letters form other words.

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Etymology of 'Acrostic'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Acrostic" Quotes from Famous Books

... very sad I'm. I sent you, or I mistake myself foully, A very excellent imitation of the poet Cowley, Containing three very fair stanzas, Which number Longinus, a very critical man, says, And Aristotle, who was a critic ten times more caustic, To a nicety fits a valentine or an acrostic. And yet for all my pains to this moving epistle, I have got no answer, so I suppose I may go whistle. Perhaps you'd have preferred that like an old monk I had pattered on In the style and after the manner of the unfortunate Chatterton; Or ...

— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... wording belong to ingenuity rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the Persian poet who left out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in his verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross, a lozenge,—everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured after when "copying the language of Queen Anne," and succeeded in attaining, was the spirit and ...

— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

Words linked to "Acrostic" : puzzler, literary work, puzzle, mystifier, word square