Greek , Ireland A well-known acrostic in Greek is for the phrase
JESUS CHRIST, GOD’S SON, SAVIOUR, the initial letters of which spell (
ICHTHYS), which means
fish:
Ιησοῦς I Jesus
Χριστός CH Christ
Θεοῦ TH God's
Υἱός Y Son
Σωτήρ S Saviour According to
Cicero, acrostics were a regular feature of
Sibylline prophecies (which were written in Greek
hexameters. The type of acrostic is that known as a “gamma acrostic” (from the shape of the Greek letter ), where the same words are found both horizontally and vertically. Cicero refers to an acrostic in this passage using the Greek word . The 3rd-century BC didactic poet
Aratus, who was much admired and imitated by Cicero, Virgil and other Latin writers, appears to have started a fashion for using acrostics. One example is the famous passage in
Phaenomena 783–7 where the word occurs as a gamma acrostic and also twice in the text, as well as diagonally in the text and even cryptically taking the initial letters of certain words in lines 2 and 1: : : : : : : : : : : :“If (the moon is) slender and clear about the third day, :she will bode fair weather; if slender and very red, :wind; if the crescent is thickish, with blunted horns, :having a feeble fourth-day light after the third day, :either it is blurred by a southerly or because rain is in the offing.” (trans. Jerzy Danielewicz)
Latin Several acrostics have recently been discovered in Roman poets, especially in
Virgil. Among others, in
Eclogue 9 the acrostic (lines 34–38) immediately precedes the words , and (i.e. ) (lines 46–51) in a passage which mentions the goddess
Dione (another name for
Venus). In
Eclogue 8, alongside a passage dedicating the poem to an unnamed person and asking him to accept it, Neil Adkin reads the words (i.e. ) (). : : : : :“It was a custom in
Hesperian
Latium, which originally the
Alban :cities kept as sacred, and now, greatest of entities, :Rome keeps, whenever they move
Mars to the first battles, :whether (they are preparing) to bring tearful war to the
Getae …” In
Georgics 1 429–433, next to a passage which contains the words , the double-letter reverse acrostic
MA VE PV (i.e. Publius Vergilius Maro) is found on alternate lines. Another double acrostic is found in
Aeneid 2, where the word
PITHI (i.e. , Greek for he ‘persuades’ or ‘he deceives’) is found first backwards at 103–107, then forwards at 142–146, at the beginning and end of a speech by Sinon persuading the Trojans to bring the wooden horse into the city. The discoverer of this acrostic, Neil Adkin, points out that the same word occurs at more or less exactly the same line-numbers in a repeated line describing how Odysseus’ wife Penelope deceived the suitors in
Odyssey 2.106 and 24.141. Another transliterated Greek word used as an acrostic in a pseudo-Sibylline prophecy has recently been noticed in the syllables
DE CA TE (i.e. Greek ) in
Eclogue 4, 9–11, with the same
DEC A TE repeated cryptically both forwards and backwards in line 11. In another pseudo-Sibylline prophecy in poem 5 of
Tibullus book 2 the words ‘hear me!’ are picked out in the first letters of alternate lines at the beginning of the prophecy. Virgil’s friend
Horace also made occasional use of acrostics, but apparently much less than Virgil. Examples are ‘learn!’ (
Odes 1.18.11–15) (forming a gamma acrostic with the word in line 18) and in
Satires 1.2.7–10, which appears just after Horace has been advised to take a rest from writing satire. The acrostic also occurs in
Ovid,
Metamorphoses 15.478–81, a passage describing the return of the peace-loving king
Numa Pompilius to Rome.
Odes 4.2, which starts with the word '(the poet) Pindar' has next to it the truncated acrostic PIN in a gamma formation. In the first poem of Horace's
Epodes (which were also known as 'iambics'), the first two lines begin , and it has been suggested that these words were deliberately chosen so that their initial letters IBI ... AM could be rearranged to read IAMBI. In his famous lines in the , lines 136–9, containing the proverb "mountains will give birth, but there will be born (nothing but) a ridiculous mouse", Horace writes a telestic MVS joined to the word 'mouse', adding to the humour of the passage. (See
The Mountain in Labour.) Towards the end of the 2nd century AD a verse-summary of the plot was added to each of the plays of
Plautus. Each of these has an acrostic of the name of the play, for example: : : : : : : :“Two fellow slaves seek a fellow female slave as a wife; :The old man commissions one of them, his son the other. :A lottery helps the old man; but he is deceived by tricks. :So, instead of the girl, a young slave is substituted, :a naughty one, who beats up the master and the farm-manager. :The young man marries Casina after she is recognised as a citizen.” The 3rd century AD poet
Commodian wrote a series of 80 short poems on Christian themes called . Each of these is fully acrostic (with the exception of poem 60, where the initial letters are in alphabetical order), starting with ‘preface’ and ‘the wrath of God’. The initials of poem 80, read backwards, give ‘Commodian, Christ’s beggar’.
Mandaean Chapters 2–5 of Book 12 in the
Right Ginza, a
Mandaic text, are acrostic hymns, with each stanza ordered according to a letter of the
Mandaic alphabet.
Dutch There is an acrostic secreted in the Dutch national anthem
Wilhelmus (
William): the first letters of its fifteen stanzas spell WILLEM VAN NASSOV(The then name for Nassau). This was one of the hereditary titles of
William the Silent, who introduces himself in the poem to the Dutch people. This title also returned in the 2010
speech from the throne, during the
Dutch State Opening of Parliament, whose first 15 lines also formed WILLEM VAN NASSOV.
English Vladimir Nabokov's short story "
The Vane Sisters" is known for its acrostic final paragraph, which contains a message from beyond the grave. In 1829,
Edgar Allan Poe wrote an acrostic and simply titled it "An Acrostic", possibly dedicated to his cousin Elizabeth Rebecca Herring (though the initials L.E.L. refer to
Letitia Elizabeth Landon):
Elizabeth it is in vain you say "
Love not" — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:
In vain those words from thee or L.E.L.
Zantippe's talents had enforced so well:
Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,
Breath it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.
Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried
To cure his love — was cured of all beside —
His folly — pride — and passion — for he died. An even more complicated acrostic was his sonnet
"An Enigma" (1848) containing the hidden name of
Sarah Anna Lewis (first letter of the first line, second letter of the second line, etc.). In 1939,
Rolfe Humphries received a lifelong ban from contributing to
Poetry magazine after he penned and attempted to publish "a poem containing a concealed scurrilous phrase aimed at a well-known person", namely
Nicholas Murray Butler. The poem, entitled "An ode for a Phi Beta Kappa affair", was in
unrhymed iambic pentameter, contained one
classical reference per line, and ran as follows:
Niobe's daughters yearn to the womb again,
Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone;
Chaos in cry,
Actaeon's angry pack,
Hounds of
Molossus, shaggy wolves driven
Over
Ampsanctus' vale and
Pentheus' glade,
Laelaps and
Ladon, Dromas,
Canace,
As these in fury harry brake and hill
So the great dogs of evil bay the world.
Memory, Mother of
Muses, be resigned
Until King
Saturn comes to rule again!
Remember now no more the golden day
Remember now no more the fading gold,
Astraea fled,
Proserpina in
hell;
You searchers of the earth be reconciled!
Because, through all the blight of human woe,
Under
Robigo's rust, and
Clotho's shears,
The mind of man still keeps its argosies,
Lacedaemonian Helen wakes her tower,
Echo replies, and lamentation loud
Reverberates from
Thrace to
Delos Isle;
Itylus grieves, for whom the
nightingale Sweetly as ever tunes her Daulian strain.
And over
Tenedos the flagship burns.
How shall men loiter when the great moon shines
Opaque upon the sail, and
Argive seas
Rear like blue dolphins their cerulean curves?
Samos is fallen,
Lesbos streams with fire,
Etna in rage,
Canopus cold in hate,
Summon the Orphic bard to stranger dreams.
And so for us who raise
Athene's torch.
Sufficient to her message in this hour:
Sons of
Columbia, awake, arise!
Acrostic: Nicholas Murray Butler is a horse's ass. In an October 2009
veto message by
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, rejecting a bill introduced by assemblyman
Tom Ammiano, the first letters of lines 3-9 spelled "Fuck You"; Schwarzenegger claimed that the acrostic message was coincidental, which mathematicians Stephen Devlin and Philip Stark disputed as statistically implausible. In January 2010,
Jonathan I. Schwartz, the CEO of
Sun Microsystems, sent an email to Sun employees on the completion of the acquisition of Sun by
Oracle Corporation. The initial letters of the first seven paragraphs spelled "Beat
IBM".
James May, who would later become a presenter on the BBC program
Top Gear, was fired from the publication
Autocar for spelling out a message using the large red
initial at the beginning of each review in the publication's
Road Test Yearbook Issue for 1992. Properly punctuated, the message reads: "So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse." In the 2012 third novel of his
Caged Flower series, author Cullman Wallace used acrostics as a plot device. The parents of a protagonist send e-mails where the first letters of the lines reveal their situation in a concealed message. On 19 August 2017, the members of president
Donald Trump's
Committee on Arts and Humanities resigned in protest over his response to the
Unite the Right rally incident in Charlottesville, Virginia. The members' letter of resignation contained the acrostic "RESIST" formed from the first letter of each paragraph. On 23 August 2017,
University of California, Berkeley energy professor Daniel Kammen resigned from his position as a State Department science envoy with a resignation letter in which the word "IMPEACH" was spelled out by the first letters of each paragraph. In the video game
Zork the first letters of sentences in a prayer spelled "
Odysseus" which was a possible solution to a
Cyclops encounter in another room. All three seasons of the American animated series
The Owl House use acrostics in their episode titles. The first two seasons use the first letters to spell out "A WITCH LOSES A TRUE WAY" and "SEEK THE KEY, FEAR THE LOCK," respectively; while, the third season uses the first words to spell out "Thanks For Watching." After the
San Jose Sharks defeated the
Vegas Golden Knights in a April 24, 2022 game, the following Tuesday night during a Sharks home game saw messages on the jumbotron being shared by the team during the intermissions. One of them was a message mentioning the recent win which containing an acrostic that spelled out "Fuck the Knights". In 2023, pop singer
Shakira released the song "
Acróstico", which spells out the names of her children Milan and Sasha in the first letters of each line. On 4 May 2024,
Noelia Voigt resigned as
Miss USA 2023 with a resignation letter containing an acrostic spelling out "I am silenced". == Multiple acrostics ==