Word.ws English Dictionary

proto-epics

proto-epics is the plural of proto-epic.

Meaning of proto-epic

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

Questions about proto-epics

What is proto-epics the plural of?
Proto-epics is the plural of proto-epic.

Words near proto-epics in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: proto-epics (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

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