Word.ws English Dictionary

telephilon

telephilon noun: a plant used in Ancient Greece in divinatory rituals regarding matters of love or sex.

Noun

telephilon (uncountable)

  1. A plant used in Ancient Greece in divinatory rituals regarding matters of love or sex.
    • Sophronia sat, lost.
      In deep muse. Round her ebony chair
      Lay the cracked leaves of the telephilon.1872, Emily E. Ford, My Recreations: Verses, New York: Hurd and Houghton, page 150
    • Theocritus, an ancient Greek poet, says that the leaf of a flower called telephion was used by the boys of Crotona as an amatory oracle. [...] Telephilon has been identified as a kind of pepper tree, or, according to some, as the poppy.1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 231

Origin of telephilon

Borrowed from Ancient Greek τηλέφιλον (tēléphilon); ? from a Pre-Greek word, possibly altered to reflect τῆλε (têle, “far, afar”) + φίλον (phílon, “beloved, love”).

Questions about telephilon

What does telephilon mean?
Telephilon means a plant used in Ancient Greece in divinatory rituals regarding matters of love or sex.
What part of speech is telephilon?
Telephilon is a noun.

Words near telephilon in the dictionary

  1. telepediatrics
  2. telepeptide
  3. telepersonals
  4. telepheme
  5. telephemes
  6. telephilon
  7. telephobia
  8. telephobic
  9. telephonable
  10. telephone
  11. telephone alphabet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: telephilon (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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