Stemmatics
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The study of multiple surviving versions of the same text with the aim of reconstructing a lost original. uncountable
"In other words, they must carry out an operation similar to the collations required by Lachmannian stemmatics, after which they must make a critical (i.e., subjective) choice. And, when constituting the text, they do not just slavishly copy their source, obvious errors included; their editions always contain an element of interpretation."
- 2 the humanistic discipline that attempts to reconstruct the transmission of a text (especially a text in manuscript form) on the basis of relations between the various surviving manuscripts (sometimes using cladistic analysis) wordnet
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"In other words, they must carry out an operation similar to the collations required by Lachmannian stemmatics, after which they must make a critical (i.e., subjective) choice. And, when constituting the text, they do not just slavishly copy their source, obvious errors included; their editions always contain an element of interpretation."
Etymology
From stemma, from Ancient Greek στέμματα (stémmata, “family trees, genealogy”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.