epimyth
English edit
Etymology edit
From Greek ἐπιμύθιον, neutral of ἐπιμύθιος, from ἐπί ‘upon’ + μῦθος ‘story, fable’.
Pronunciation edit
Noun edit
epimyth (plural epimyths)
- 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.