ouroboros means A serpent, dragon or worm that eats its own tail, a representation of the continuous cycle of life and death. It carries an Arena rating of 2057, earned across 32 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, ouroboros ranks #29 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #33 of 17,104 for Most Storied Words, #159 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #182 of 17,126 for Most Satisfying to Say.
ouroboros is pronounced /uːˈrɒbəˌrɒs/.
Why “ouroboros” is a great word
A serpent, dragon, or worm depicted eating its own tail, symbolizing the cyclical nature of life, death, and renewal, or anything of a similarly circular or recursive nature. From Ancient Greek οὐροβόρος (ourobóros, “tail-devouring”), a compound of οὐρά (ourá, “tail”) + -βόρος (-bóros, “-devouring”, from βιβρώσκω (bibrṓskō, “to eat up”)), the word entered English in the early seventeenth century via alchemical and hermetic texts. Unlike 'cyclical,' which describes mere repetition without the violence of self-consumption, or 'recursive,' a term of logic and computation stripped of mythological weight, the ouroboros is a dense glyph of myth and metaphysics. It is the alchemical serpent engraved in gold, the silent engine of the cosmos consuming its own exhaust, the perfect circle where end kisses beginning with scaled lips—an ancient, elegant answer to the terror of finitude.
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”))).
noun
- A serpent, dragon or worm that eats its own tail, a representation of the continuous cycle of life and death.
- Anything of a circular or recursive nature.e.g.“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.” — 2019 March 6, Soraya Roberts, “Reality Bites Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony”, in The Atlantic:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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