Other forms: anthologies
An anthology is a book that gathers writing by many different people into one volume. The fat paperback of war poetry handed round a classroom; a Christmas collection of ghost stories, each one by somebody else.
It has stretched well beyond books. A television anthology series gives every episode its own story, its own cast and its own ending. Musicians release an anthology when they pull years of work into one set. The verb is anthologise, spelled anthologize in America, and a poem that has been anthologised is one an editor thought worth keeping. It nearly always takes OF: an anthology of Irish short stories. One thing to watch — the pieces in an anthology stand alone and mostly had a life before it, so a book of chapters that only make sense in order is not an anthology.
1nounanthologyA book collecting poems, stories or essays by a number of different writers.~37%
“Her poem appears in an anthology of new Scottish writing.”
synonyms: collection, compilation
2nouncollectionA collection of the best of one artist's work, gathered from across a career.~2%
“The anthology runs from his first single to the last album.”
3nounseriesA series in which each episode tells a separate story with its own cast.~61%
“It is an anthology, so you can start with any episode you like.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
anthology is a kind of book.
The Greek is gathering flowers. An anthology is the pieces one person picked out, the way you would pick flowers and carry them home.
hooks ontoflower
The Greek word was anthologia, flower-gathering, from anthos, a flower, and legō, I gather or pick up. Meleager of Gadara put one together around 60 BCE and called it the Stephanos, the garland: every poem a flower, the book a wreath of them. Greek culture treated the flower as the sign of the finer feelings only poetry could carry. Later editors renamed the thing anthology, and the name has stuck to every collection since.
Ancient Greek
ἀνθολογία — flower-gathering
English, today
anthology
Built from
Ancient Greek ἀνθολογία (“flower-gathering”), from ἀνθολογέω (“I gather flowers”), from ἄνθος (“flower”) + λέγω (“I gather, pick up, collect”), coined by Meleager of Gadara circa 60 BCE, originally as Στέφανος (στέφανος (“garland”)) to describe a collection of poetry, later retitled anthology – see Greek Anthology. Anthologiai were collections of small Greek poems and epigrams, because in Greek culture the flower symbolized the finer sentiments that only poetry can express. by surface analysis, antho- + -logy.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA