Acrostic

Quick meaning: Acrostic is a noun meaning A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.

Meaning

A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.

More Meanings

1. A poem in Hebrew in which successive lines or verses start with consecutive letters of the alphabet.
2. A kind of word puzzle, whose solution forms an anagram of a quotation, with its initial letters often forming the name of the person quoted.
3. Of or pertaining to acrostics.
4. A kind of word puzzle in which a series of words are clued, and individual letters from the clued word spell out one or more additional words.

Example Sentences

I have written an acroſticke ſonet to his Maieſtie, a canzonet to the Queene, and another acroſticke unto the Prince; whoſe ſervant I am by vow, and ſubordinate ſubject by birth.

On this monument is a long epitaph in verse, which is printed in Prince's Worthies. It is an acrostic, the first letters of each line forming the words "Oliver Hill of Shilston."

And afterwards gives as many reaſons for it, as there are letters in Hibernaculum Ciconiarum, and that too in the Acrostick way, each ſentence beginning with a letter of thoſe words, according to their order.

There is a most crying dullness on both sides. I have seen tory acrostics and whig anagrams, and do not quarrel with either of them, because they are whigs or tories, but because they are anagrams and acrostics.

Word Forms

• acrostics
• acrostick
• acrosticke

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include anagrammatic, acrostich, acrosticke, acrostick, abecedarius, telestich.

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