Word.ws English Dictionary

Atreidae

Atreidae proper noun: collectively, the family and descendants of the mythical Mycenaean king Atreus, including either of his sons Menelaus and Agamemnon, who both feature in the Iliad.

Proper noun

the Atreidae pl (plural only)

  1. (Greek, plural, plural-only) Collectively, the family and descendants of the mythical Mycenaean king Atreus, including either of his sons Menelaus and Agamemnon, who both feature in the Iliad.
    • Yet the poet refuses to project the evil of the Atreidae so far into the past as to make the arch-offender that ancestor of Agamemnon […]1924, Herbert Weir Smyth, “VI. Orestea. I: Agamemnon”, in Aeschylean Tragedy, page 159

Origin of Atreidae

Borrowed from Latin Atrīdae, from Ancient Greek Ἀτρεῖδαι (Atreîdai), nominative plural of Ancient Greek Ἀτρείδης (Atreídēs). By surface analysis, Atreus + -id.

Questions about Atreidae

What does Atreidae mean?
Atreidae means collectively, the family and descendants of the mythical Mycenaean king Atreus, including either of his sons Menelaus and Agamemnon, who both feature in the Iliad.
What part of speech is Atreidae?
Atreidae is a proper noun.

Words near Atreidae in the dictionary

  1. atrede
  2. atredes
  3. atreding
  4. ATREE
  5. Atreid
  6. Atreidae
  7. Atreids
  8. Atrek
  9. atremble
  10. atreme
  11. atren

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Atreidae (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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Cite this entry: “Atreidae.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/atreidae. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.