Word of the Day

: June 15, 2007

anabasis

noun uh-NAB-uh-sis

What It Means

1 : a going or marching up : advance; especially : a military advance

2 : a difficult and dangerous military retreat

anabasis in Context

In U.S. history class, we learned about General Sherman's famous anabasis through the South.

Did You Know?

The first sense of "anabasis" follows logically enough from its roots. In Greek, the word originally meant "inland march"; it is derived from "anabainein," meaning "to go up or inland," which is formed by combining the prefix "ana-" ("up") and "bainein" ("to go"). The second and opposite sense, however, comes from an anabasis gone wrong. In 401 B.C., Greek mercenaries fighting for Cyrus the Younger marched into the Persian Empire only to find themselves cut off hundreds of miles from home. As a result, they were forced to undertake an arduous and embattled retreat across unknown territories. Xenophon, a Greek historian who accompanied the mercenaries on the march, wrote the epic narrative Anabasis about this experience, and consequently "anabasis" came to mean a dramatic retreat as well as an advance.

*Indicates the sense illustrated by the example sentence.