Word.ws English Dictionary

Achillean

/əˈkɪliən/

Achillean adjective: resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.

Adjective

Achillean (comparative more Achillean, superlative most Achillean)

  1. Resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.
    • Guyon subdues these Achillean affections through his own power; but they break out again as Cymochles lapses into lust and Pyrochles burns in the idle lake.1959 September, A.C. Hamilton, “Spenser's Treatment of Myth”, in ELH, volume 26, number 3
    • Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has offered salutary warnings against seeing in male homosexuality a simple "epitome, ... The two genres of homosocial behavior in the text can be seen as chivalric or antichivalric, Hectoresque or Achillean: the first is active, specular, militant, conservative, apparently...1995, Eric Scott Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England, →ISBN
    1. Invincible with only one small weakness (an Achilles heel), which becomes one's downfall.
    2. Guided by emotional motives, especially rage, rather than reason.
  2. Of or relating to Achilles Tatius, a Roman-era Greek writer.
    • There is, I suggest, a typically Achillean joke at play here, a visual pun, displaying the phoenix as truly phoenix-ian in its exposure of its sex organs and at the same time snidely alluding to the Phoenicians' famed preoccupation with female genitalia.2004, Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, →ISBN
    • We are once again reaching a period in our collective cultural history when we may resume the post-Platonic, Achillean conversation.2009, David A. Powell, 21st-Century Gay Culture, →ISBN, page 51
  3. Pertaining to the Achilles tendon.
    • Tendon-reflexes, as a rule, remain intact, except the Achillean one, which is frequently either absent or lowered.1890, The London Medical Recorder - Volume 3, page 481
    • The Achillean reflex is the contraction obtained in the gastrocnemii and solei by the percussion of the tendo Achillis.1901, The Medical Examiner and General Practitioner
  4. Of or relating to sexual or romantic intimacy between men, supposedly in the style of Achilles' relationship with Patroclus.
    • Historically, there was indeed an Achillean, homosexual flavor of the declassé bachelorhood out of which Hitler and others formed the advance guard of National Socialism.1980, Douglas Fowler, A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow, page 169
    • Thus, he exalts as a means of republican cohesion, as the unshakeable basis of the modern nation what he calls "manly love," a sort of Achillean friendship, but at the same time it is this love, this passionate friendship that he sings.1995, Gay Wilson Allen, Ed Folsom, Walt Whitman & the World, →ISBN, page 254
    Synonyms:
    MLM

Noun

Achillean (plural Achilleans)

  1. A fighter on the side of Achilles in the Trojan war; an Achaean.
    • [A] singular genius, whose mathematical studies gave him in his own day the reputation of a necromancer, espousing fervently the cause of Hector, called out in a voice of thunder, "Let us see whether the Achilleans can fight as well as speak?"1881, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of Don Quixote of la Mancha, page 453
    • Even the romantic and glorious vision of this war is mostly rhetoric because the cunning Ulysses with the Achilleans invented the successful stratagem of the horse for committing great evils with the destruction of the city, ...2009, Velio Bocci, Women At The Helm, Arena books, →ISBN

Examples of Achillean in a sentence

  • The posterior compartment contains the Achille's tendon, the deep pre-Achillean and superficial retro-Achillean bursae, and the posterior aspect of the talo-calcaneal joint.2015, Yasser El Miedany, Musculoskeletal Ultrasonography in Rheumatic Diseases, →ISBN, page 371:
  • For Theocritus Idyll 29.34 the sexual love between Achilles and Patroclus was so uncontroversial that it could be referred to in a pederastic poem by means of the shorthand "Achillean friends".2007, Waldemar Heckel, Lawrence A. Tritle, Pat Wheatley, Alexander's Empire: Formulation to Decay, page 87:

Synonyms of Achillean

Forms of Achillean

Adjective
comparativemore Achillean
superlativemost Achillean
Noun
pluralAchilleans

Origin of Achillean

From Latin Achillēus + -an. By surface analysis, Achilles + -ean.

Questions about Achillean

What does Achillean mean?
Achillean means resembling or relating to Achilles, the hero of the Iliad.
How do you use Achillean in a sentence?
The posterior compartment contains the Achille's tendon, the deep pre-Achillean and superficial retro-Achillean bursae, and the posterior aspect of the talo-calcaneal joint.
What part of speech is Achillean?
Achillean can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce Achillean?
Achillean is pronounced /əˈkɪliən/.

Words near Achillean in the dictionary

  1. achilid
  2. achilids
  3. achilixiid
  4. achill
  5. achillea
  6. Achillean
  7. Achilleans
  8. achilleas
  9. achilleate
  10. achilleates
  11. achilleic acid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Achillean (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-NaomiAmethyst-Achillean.wav.

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