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Acephalous
Definitions
- 1 Having no head.
"[…] Mr. Cruickshank saw a Monster nine Months old, which lived thirty-six Hours after it was born, though it had no Cranium: […] But is this a Reason that we should believe the vital Functions and the Increase of the Body have no dependence on the Brain? I think not: for such acephalous Subjects never live long […]"
- 2 Without a distinct head.
- 3 Having the style spring from the base, instead of from the apex, as is the case in certain ovaries
- 4 A system of society without centralised state authority, where power is welded amongst groups of community entities e.g. clans. Without a leader or chief.
"an acephalous society / community"
- 5 Deficient in the beginning, as a line of poetry that is missing its expected opening syllable.
"They have acephalous or headless Verses, which commence with a short Syllable instead of a long one:"
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- 6 Lacking the first portion of the text. (of a manuscript)
- 7 Without a beginning. rare
"1828, Thomas de Quincey, review of Elements of Rhetoric by Richard Whately, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 24, No. 147, December 1828, p. 905, Men wrote eloquently, because they wrote feelingly: they wrote idiomatically, because they wrote naturally, and without affectation: but if a false or acephalous structure of sentence,—if a barbarous idiom—or an exotic word happened to present itself, no writer of the 17th century seems to have had any such scrupulous sense of the dignity belonging to his own language, as should make it a duty to reject it, or worth his while to re-model a line."
- 1 lacking a head or a clearly defined head wordnet
Etymology
From French acéphale, from Ancient Greek ἀκέφαλος (aképhalos, “headless”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + κεφαλή (kephalḗ, “head”). By surface analysis, a- + -cephalous.
See also for "acephalous"
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