Word.ws English Dictionary

batrachomyomachian

batrachomyomachian adjective: petty (chiefly of a quarrel).

Adjective

batrachomyomachian (comparative more batrachomyomachian, superlative most batrachomyomachian)

  1. (rare) Petty (chiefly of a quarrel).
    • ...sounded throughout to my own ears as a Batrachomyomachian battle between the croaks and the squeaks...1933, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Earl Leslie Griggs, Philip Hamilton McMillan, Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • The batrachomyomachian cure for the superhuman ego is to chop it off at the knees and cut it down to a human, preferably humane, level.1971, Edwin Harrison Cady, The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction

Forms of batrachomyomachian

comparativemore batrachomyomachian
superlativemost batrachomyomachian

Origin of batrachomyomachian

From Batrachomyomachia (Ancient Greek βάτραχος, frog, μῦς, mouse, and μάχη, battle), a comic epic parodying the Iliad in which a diving frog accidentally drowns a mouse riding on his back, prompting a war between the species.

Questions about batrachomyomachian

What does batrachomyomachian mean?
Batrachomyomachian means petty (chiefly of a quarrel).
What part of speech is batrachomyomachian?
Batrachomyomachian is an adjective.

Words near batrachomyomachian in the dictionary

  1. batrachoidiforms
  2. batrachoids
  3. batrachology
  4. batrachomorph
  5. batrachomorphs
  6. batrachomyomachian
  7. batrachomyomachies
  8. batrachomyomachy
  9. batrachophagous
  10. batrachophobia
  11. batrachosauroidid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: batrachomyomachian (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: “batrachomyomachian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/batrachomyomachian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.