Word of the Day Archive
Thursday April 5, 2012
ephebe \ih-FEEB\
, noun:
A young man.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
-- James Joyce, Ulysses
The three Florentine Davids, those of Donatello, Verrocchio, and Michelangelo, represent the changes in the ideal of male beauty and the model of an ephebe. They are ever smaller, more strained, girlish.
-- Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
The summer before his senior year of college, in 1997, he worked as an intern at The Paris Review. James Linville, who was then the magazine’s editor, recalled Rowan as an “ephebe type, almost Truman Capote-like.”
-- Lizzie Widdicombe, “The Plagiarist’s Tale,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 2012
Ephebe stems from the Greek word for a young man just entering manhood and commencing training for full Athenian citizenship. It comes from the roots ep- meaning "near" and hḗbē meaning "manhood."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for ephebe
