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eidolopoeia

eidolopoeia noun: a rhetorical technique in which a speech is attributed to a deceased person, a phantom, an image or an idol.

Noun

eidolopoeia (uncountable)

  1. (rhetoric) A rhetorical technique in which a speech is attributed to a deceased person, a phantom, an image or an idol.
    • The status of the speaker at the time the speech is imagined as being given is what determines whether it is ethopoeia or eidolopoeia. A speech Heracles might have given while alive is an example of ethopoeia, a speech he might have given after death is an eidolopoeia2003, “The Preliminary Exercises of Aphthonius the Sophist”, in George Alexander Kennedy, editor, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands...

Forms of eidolopoeia

alternative formeidolopeia
alternative formidolopoeia

Origin of eidolopoeia

From Ancient Greek εἰδωλοποιία (eidōlopoiía, “formation of images; putting words into the mouth of a dead person”), from εἰδωλοποιός (eidōlopoiós, “producing phantom-like appearances”), from εἴδωλον (eídōlon, “phantom”) + ποιός (poiós, “-like”).

Questions about eidolopoeia

What does eidolopoeia mean?
Eidolopoeia means a rhetorical technique in which a speech is attributed to a deceased person, a phantom, an image or an idol.
What part of speech is eidolopoeia?
Eidolopoeia is a noun.

Words near eidolopoeia in the dictionary

  1. eidological
  2. eidology
  3. eidolon
  4. eidolons
  5. eidolopeia
  6. eidolopoeia
  7. eidoloscope
  8. eidoloscopes
  9. eidos
  10. eidotrope
  11. eidotropes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: eidolopoeia (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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