Word.ws English Dictionary

Tiresias

Tiresias proper noun: a long-lived blind soothsayer who participated over seven generations in the legendary history of (the Greek city) Thebes, noted also for being transformed into a woman for seven years, so being symbolic of androgyny.

Proper noun

Tiresias

  1. (Greek) A long-lived blind soothsayer who participated over seven generations in the legendary history of (the Greek city) Thebes, noted also for being transformed into a woman for seven years, so being symbolic of androgyny.
    • […]somewhere a ship's radio was blaring out the latest jazz-hit to reach Alexandria:
      Old Tiresias / No one half so breezy as, / Half so free and easy as / Old Tiresias.1958, Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar, page 35
    • The myth associated with how Tiresias became a hermaphrodite reveals much about relations between the sexes.2004, Leonard Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, page 255

Forms of Tiresias

alternative formTeiresias

Origin of Tiresias

Borrowed from Ancient Greek Τειρεσίας (Teiresías).

Questions about Tiresias

What does Tiresias mean?
Tiresias means a long-lived blind soothsayer who participated over seven generations in the legendary history of (the Greek city) Thebes, noted also for being transformed into a woman for seven years, so being symbolic of androgyny.
What part of speech is Tiresias?
Tiresias is a proper noun.

Words near Tiresias in the dictionary

  1. tiremakers
  2. tiremaking
  3. tires
  4. tires out
  5. Tiresian
  6. Tiresias
  7. tiresome
  8. tiresomely
  9. tiresomeness
  10. tiresomenesses
  11. tiresomest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Tiresias (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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