Word.ws English Dictionary

proto-epic

proto-epic noun: an underlying or root epic upon which many later epics are variants.

Noun

proto-epic (plural proto-epics)

  1. An underlying or root epic upon which many later epics are variants.
    • Just so, two IE-speaking cultures sang of an epoch-marking war, brought on by the chief god to relieve the earth of mortals. Do these then descend from a proto-epic, sung by people who spoke the language ancestral to Greek and Sanskrit?2025 December 12, Tom Hercules Davies, “Horses, Wheels, Languages: Greek, Mesopotamian and Indic Epic on the Eurasian Steppe”, in The Classical Quarterly, volume 75, number 1, page 8

Forms of proto-epic

pluralproto-epics

Origin of proto-epic

From proto- + epic.

Questions about proto-epic

What does proto-epic mean?
Proto-epic means an underlying or root epic upon which many later epics are variants.
What part of speech is proto-epic?
Proto-epic is a noun.
What is the plural of proto-epic?
The plural of proto-epic is proto-epics.

Words near proto-epic in the dictionary

  1. Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  2. Proto-Eastern Polynesian
  3. Proto-Edoid
  4. proto-emotion
  5. proto-emotions
  6. proto-epic
  7. proto-epics
  8. Proto-Eskimo
  9. proto-fascist
  10. proto-fascists
  11. Proto-Finnic

Source and license

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