Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Marked by aphorisms; aphoristic: gnomic verse; a gnomic style.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Containing or dealing in maxims; sententious.
- In grammar, used in maxims or general statements; applied to express a universal truth: as, a gnomic aorist.
- A contracted form of gnomonic.
Wiktionary
- adj. Of, or relating to gnomes.
- adj. of a saying or aphorism Mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Sententious; uttering or containing maxims, or striking detached thoughts; aphoristic.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. relating to or containing gnomes
Examples
“When reviewers and prize jurors tout a repetitive style as "the last word in gnomic control," or a jumble of unsustained metaphor as "lyrical" writing, it is obvious that they, too, are having difficulty understanding what they read.”
“But since the subsistence is one, and He Who exercises the will is one, the object of the will, [1858] that is, the gnomic will [1859], is also one, His human will evidently following His divine will, and willing that which the divine will willed it to will.”
“Here we have first religious meditations and legends of Saints, then proverbial, or as they are called "gnomic" verses, next allegorical descriptions by means of animals, and finally riddles.”
History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour
“(_g_) Lastly, like nearly all the dramatists of his day and of times much earlier, Shakespeare was fond of 'gnomic' passages, and introduces them probably not more freely than his readers like, but more freely than, I suppose, a good play-wright now would care to do.”
Shakespearean Tragedy Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
“It is true that Mr. Yaffe calls Mr. Dylan, at one point, a "gnomic adenoidal seer.”
“The original Japanese editions have gnomic little phrases on their obi strips instead.”
“Being a New York type, Artifex deploys an arsenal of ironic, gnomic, one-liners: "Life is an opportunity to make things happen," "What is more important than maintaining one's enthusiasm?”
The Huffington Post: Regina Weinreich: Revolutions of the Mind: Three Sisters and Mistakes Were Made
“Being a New York type, Artifex deploys an arsenal of ironic, gnomic, one-liners: "Life is an opportunity to make things happen,""What is more important than maintaining one's enthusiasm?”
The Huffington Post: Regina Weinreich: Revolutions of the Mind: Three Sisters and Mistakes Were Made
“Adapter and star Moe Angelos plays the young Sontag alongside a video projection of the older, more iconic Sontag also played by Angelos, who smokes and offers gnomic comments while observing the action.”
The Huffington Post: Michael Giltz: Theater: Under The Radar and Coil Warm Up January
“Dapple-dawn-drawn", from The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins, would be a nicely gnomic addition to a drab wall anywhere.”
The Guardian: People of Britain, it's time to carve a few lines of poetry into your wheelbarrow
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘gnomic’.
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MyWordList
for GRE Vocab Building
eccentricity, rife, epiphany, menial, assert, plod, scathing, petty, chum, dilatory, prolific, banal and 10 more...
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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phrontistery - g
from phrontistery.info
gabardine, gabbart, gabble, gabbro, gabelle, gabion, gablock, gad, gadarene, gadoid, gadroon, gadzookery and 439 more...
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New words
new words or spelling issues
voluble, Metagrobolize, salubrious, calumny, fugacity, withdrawal, bourse, hypertrophy, leitmotif, argot, improvident, damask and 238 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Words with that horrible 'gn' sound
pregnant, interregnum, impregnable, signal, signature, prognosis, ignorant, ignominious, magnum, diagnosis, designation, incognito and 37 more...
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Metawords
Talking about talking, writing about writing, etc.
epizeuxis, tautological, aptote, bibliophagist, parataxis, scriptorium, aposiopesis, variorum, chantefable, boustrophedon, psellism, adoxography and 51 more...
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Potpourri
eponymous, aa, pulchritude, gizmo, macabre, sui generis, solecism, solipsism, eldritch, samizdat, queue, obsequious and 469 more...
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work these into conversation
Challenge!
legerdemain, polysemic, rupestrian, callipygian, oscitancy, numen, lucubration, asperity, amalgam, apposite, wastrel, eleemosynary and 208 more...
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Dictionary.com Words of the Days of 1999
1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008
emolument, palindrome, deprecate, bivouac, umbrage, incipient, dapple, pugnacious, capitulate, susurrus, thaumaturgy, capacious and 229 more...
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Vocabulary
Words I come across while reading.
talus, echelon, onanistic, cabochon, avocation, charnel, moue, portentous, prolixity, astringent, hoary, patina and 165 more...
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Consider the Lobster
By David Foster Wallace
percussive, discursive, lugubrious, docent, assiduously, berm, wag, bonmot, imbroglio, telegraph, fissile, rube and 220 more...
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azd's Words
adamantine, abatial, ablate, ablative, abrogate, accretive, acromegaly, acrostic, actinism, actinic, acuity, adduce and 968 more...
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NTDW1
template, modal, sublingual, tandem, polycentric, septuagenarian, token, irrevocable, denotive, augural, aberrant, phlebotomy and 1188 more...
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enjoidooks's Words
rastafari, facetious, desultory, dubiously, ineluctable, incarnadine, diapason, alembic, empathy, feckless, transcendence, thus and 190 more...
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Hitch Words
Words from the lexicon of Christopher Hitchens
propinquity, fratricide, factitious, vitiate, sectarianism, ostensible, atavistic, sephardic, doyen, palpable, encephalitic, fastidious and 188 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for gnomic.
johnmperry Somebody sent me this yesterday:
Thoughts of a Jewish Buddhist
Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with posture like that.
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.
Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, Danish.
The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?
Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
To Find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes.
Zen Judaism: For You, A Little Enlightenment
by David M. Bader Jun 21, 2008
johnmperry Not the little old guys with pointy hats:
gnomic = characterized by the expression of popular wisdom in the condensed form of proverbs or aphorisms, also known as gnomes. The term was first used of the ‘Gnomic Poets’ of 6th�?century Greece, although there are older traditions of gnomic writing in Chinese, Egyptian, and other cultures; the Hebrew book of Proverbs is a well�?known collection. The term is often extended to later writings in which moral truths are presented in maxims or aphorisms. Jun 21, 2008