How to use acrostic in a sentence

13 example sentences · noun, adjective

Acrostic means a poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message. Example: “In rage and jealousy he went to the headmaster and called his attention to the acrostic – which otherwise neither he nor any other of the masters would have noticed.”

Examples of acrostic by meaning

nounA poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.

In rage and jealousy he went to the headmaster and called his attention to the acrostic – which otherwise neither he nor any other of the masters would have noticed.1929 November, Robert Graves, chapter VIII, in Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 83
A more general form of manipulation of linguistic signs is the acrostic, a set of verses (or words) whose initial letters form a word, phrase or even a sentence.1987, Jack Goody, “Language and Writing”, in The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Studies in Literacy, Family, Culture and the...

nounA kind of word puzzle, whose solution forms an anagram of a quotation, with its initial letters often forming the name...

those who rack their brains in solving the Acrostics in our Sunday papers will, perchance, be saved many a rack and many a failure by our reverse alphabetical arrangement1924, Lawrence H. Dawson, “Preface”, in John Walker, The Rhyming Dictionary of The English Language, London / New York: George Routledge...
For those of you who are new to acrostics, here is what to do.2003, Anne Brown, “Introduction”, in Challenging Acrostic Puzzles, New York, N.Y.: Sterling Publishing Co., →ISBN, page 5

adjectiveOf or pertaining to acrostics.

Other ancients have suggested that the original verses were written in hieroglyphs and also mentioned the acrostic code.1998, Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness, Harvard University Press, page 42

More sentences with acrostic

The games are a bit archaically presented, but they include palindromes, acrostics, higgledy-piggledies, anagrams, etc.1994, Herbert Kohl, Masters' Word Game Collection, page 249. From the entry higgledy-piggledy
Both an acrostic argument and a nonacrostic argument are prefixed to some of Plautus's comedies.1990, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Micklus, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, page 38. From the entry nonacrostic
Such lines are said to be acephalous (headless) or, as acrostic writers would put it, “beheaded.”1934, Robert Swann, Frank Sidgwick, chapter 2, in The Making of Verse: A Guide to English Metres, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, page 16. From the entry acephalous
I like composing acrostics while calculating the number of oxpeckers cleaning ticks from buffalo, giraffes and fellow rhinos.2021, Graham Fulbright, Snowcub, Kibworth Beauchamp, Leics.: Matador, →ISBN, pages 219–220. From the entry bicorn
Similarly, the verse at the close of Through the Looking Glass is an acrostic for Alice Pleasance Liddell.2008, Sherry L. Ackerman, Behind the Looking Glass, page 32. From the entry pleasance
The poem is written in an alef-lamed, bet-nun acrostic form.1996, Macy Nulman, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Prayer, page 260. From the entry interchange
I hope the addition of KenKen to the puzzles page is an accommodation to the new size, not preliminary to discontinuation of the cryptic, acrostic, diagramless, etc.2009 June 28, “The Redesign”, in New York Times. From the entry diagramless
Another high school teacher told me that he uses a similar acrostic, but his is as follows: Some Old Hippie Caught Another Hippie Tripping On Acid.2003 March 5, “Mnemonic Devices” (chapter 9), in Marcia L. Tate, editor, Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites, SAGE Publications, →ISBN…. From the entry Some Old Hippie Caught Another Hippie Tripping On Acid

Meaning of acrostic

noun A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.
noun A poem in Hebrew in which successive lines or verses start with consecutive letters of the alphabet.
noun A kind of word puzzle, whose solution forms an anagram of a quotation, with its initial letters often forming the name of the person quoted.

Full definition of acrostic

Questions about acrostic in a sentence

How do you use acrostic in a sentence?: Acrostic is used as a noun and adjective. For example: “In rage and jealousy he went to the headmaster and called his attention to the acrostic – which otherwise neither he nor any other of the masters would have noticed.”
What is a short sentence with acrostic?: “The poem is written in an alef-lamed, bet-nun acrostic form.”
What does acrostic mean?: Acrostic means a poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.

Adapted from Wiktionary: acrostic (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this page: “How to use acrostic in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/acrostic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.