Word.ws English Dictionary

epitaph

UK/ˈɛp.ɪˌtɑːf//ˈɛp.ɪˌtæf/

epitaph noun: an inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.

Noun

epitaph (plural epitaphs)

  1. An inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.
    • The church itself, or at all events the squat and tiny tower, has not altered much since Lamb saw it. But the epitaphs have gone. Search among the ivies and yews of the shady little churchyard will discover a number of flat, weatherworn slabs of stone, but the verses and the signatures have...1909, Eric Parker, chapter XXIII, in Highways and Byways in Surrey
    • Ayot St Lawrence's most famous inhabitant, George Bernard Shaw, moved into the New Rectory in 1906 because, it is said, of a gravestone epitaph in the churchyard. This recorded the death of a woman who lived to be 70 with the comment 'Her time was short'. Shaw thought that a place that considered a...1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 44
  2. A poem or other short text written in memory of a deceased person.
    • Nam vinci in amore turpissimum putant, not only living, but when their friends are dead, with tombs and monuments, nenias, epitaphs, elegies, inscriptions, pyramids, obelisks, statues, images, pictures, histories, poems, annals, feasts, anniversaries, many ages after (as Plato's scholars did) they...1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], “Honest Objects of Love”, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, […], Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC

Verb

epitaph (third-person singular simple present epitaphs, present participle epitaphing, simple past and past participle epitaphed)

  1. (intransitive) To write or speak after the manner of an epitaph.
    • The Commons in their speeches epitaph upon him […] "He lived as a wolf and died as a dog."1606, Joseph Hall, Heaven upon Earth
  2. (transitive) To commemorate by an epitaph.
    • Let me rather be epitaphed the inventor of the English Hexameter.1592, Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets

epitaph meaning in Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada

epitaph in Urdu

لوح مزار, قبر کا کتبہ

epitaph in Bengali

epitaph
এপিটাফ epiṭaph

epitaph in Malayalam

സമാധിശാസനം, മൃത്യുലേഖ, ശവകുടീരത്തിലെ സ്മാരകലേഖം

epitaph in Kannada

ಗೋರಿಬರಹ, ಸಮಾಧಿಯ ಕಲ್ಲಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಕೆತ್ತಿರುವ ಬರಹ, ಸಮಾಧಿಯ ಕಲ್ಲಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಕೆತ್ತಿರುವ ಹೇಳಿಕೆ, ಸಮಾಧಿ ಲೇಖ, ಗೋರಿಯ ಬರಹ, ಗೋರಿಯ ಕಲ್ಲಿನ ಬರಹ
More languagesFewer languages
epitaph in Malay
epitaf
epitaph in Indonesian
epitaf, tulisan nisan, puisi nisan
epitaph in Persian
مزارنوشته mazârnevešte, گورنوشته
epitaph in Vietnamese
văn bia

Examples of epitaph in a sentence

  • Average epitaph lengths and epitaphed headstone size according to three periods of time.
  • By contrast, the Statilian epitaphs are typically very simple plaques, with shorter, often poorly executed texts.
  • Under an epitaphed marble slab in a nearby grassy cemetery a loved one rots .

All 13 example sentences with epitaph

Forms of epitaph

Noun
pluralepitaphs
Verb
third-person singular presentepitaphs
present participleepitaphing
past participleepitaphed
pastepitaphed

Plural of epitaph: epitaphs

Origin of epitaph

From Old French epitafe, from Late Latin epitaphium (“eulogy”), from Ancient Greek ἐπιτάφιος (epitáphios, “relating to a funeral”), from ἐπί (epí, “over”) + τάφος (táphos, “tomb”). By surface analysis epi- + -taph.

Words formed from epitaph

Questions about epitaph

What does epitaph mean?
Epitaph means an inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.
What is epitaph in Urdu?
Epitaph in Urdu is لوح مزار, قبر کا کتبہ. See Epitaph meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is epitaph?
Epitaph can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce epitaph?
Epitaph is pronounced /ˈɛp.ɪˌtɑːf/ (UK).
What is the plural of epitaph?
The plural of epitaph is epitaphs.

Words near epitaph in the dictionary

  1. episymbionts
  2. episymbioses
  3. episymbiosis
  4. episymbiotic
  5. episynaloephe
  6. epitaph
  7. epitaphed
  8. epitapher
  9. epitaphers
  10. epitaphial
  11. epitaphian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: epitaph (page history and authors); epitaph (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); এপিটাফ (Bengali) (page history and authors); epitaph (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); epitaph (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-epitaph.ogg.

Cite this entry: “epitaph.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/epitaph. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.