Ouroboros
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A serpent, dragon or worm that eats its own tail, a representation of the continuous cycle of life and death.
"The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process."
- 2 Anything of a circular or recursive nature. broadly
"Like an ouroboros, the story created and informed by the writer’s own experience suddenly flipped back on itself, Childress’s life now reflecting the story rather than the other way around."
Example
More examples"The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process."
Etymology
From Ancient Greek οὐροβόρος (ourobóros, “tail-devouring”, a compound of οὐρά (ourá, “tail”) + -βόρος (-bóros, “-devouring”, which is derived from the verb βιβρώσκω (bibrṓskō, “to eat up”))).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.