Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Death.
- noun In Gr. myth.: The personification of oblivion, a daughter of Eris.
- noun The river of oblivion, one of the streams of Hades, the waters of which possessed the quality of causing those who drank of them to forget their former existence.
- noun A draught of oblivion; forgetfulness.
- noun In entomology, a genus of nymphalid butterflies, with one species, L. europa, from the Malay archipelago.
- An obsolete variant of
lithe .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete Death.
- noun (Class. Myth.) A river of Hades whose waters when drunk caused forgetfulness of the past.
- noun Oblivion; a draught of oblivion; forgetfulness.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (Greek mythology) a river in Hades; the souls of the dead had to drink from it, which made them forget all they had done and suffered when they were alive
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word lethe.
Examples
-
Greeks at the time, long before Aristotle, understood what Aletheia was, with heavy influence of what "lethe" was.
enowning enowning 2009
-
About as meaningless as the word ‘freedom’ is. lethe Says:
-
These are less confrontational and pose no legal threats lethe
The Editor and the Curator (Or the Context Analyst and the Media Synesthete) | Tomorrow Museum 2010
-
It accounts for concealment (lethe) in unconcealment, which in turn accounts for withholding (epechein) in the epochs.
Archive 2009-01-01 enowning 2009
-
"The event of appropriation is in itself an event of expropriation; this word takes up, in a manner commensurate with the event, the early Greek lethe, in the sense of concealment."
Archive 2009-01-01 enowning 2009
-
It accounts for concealment (lethe) in unconcealment, which in turn accounts for withholding (epechein) in the epochs.
enowning enowning 2009
-
"The event of appropriation is in itself an event of expropriation; this word takes up, in a manner commensurate with the event, the early Greek lethe, in the sense of concealment."
enowning enowning 2009
-
The link is made explicit in the first seminar where, in his analysis of repression in the Freudian sense, we come across the following observation: 'In every entry of being into its habitation in words, there's a margin of forgetting, a lethe complementary to every aletheia.
Archive 2008-03-01 enowning 2008
-
The link is made explicit in the first seminar where, in his analysis of repression in the Freudian sense, we come across the following observation: 'In every entry of being into its habitation in words, there's a margin of forgetting, a lethe complementary to every aletheia.
enowning enowning 2008
-
Meanwhile, Heidegger described lethe as a horizon from which things/beings emerge and to which beings rest.
enowning enowning 2007
kat commented on the word lethe
daimona of oblivion.
April 7, 2008
qms commented on the word lethe
Surely the most famous applications of this word are in the opening stanzas of two of Keats' Great Odes:
Ode to a Nightingale
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:...
Ode on Melancholy
NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;...
July 2, 2014
qms commented on the word lethe
He favors cold beer, crisp but yeasty,
Sweet smoke rising, thick and wreathy,
Til strangers seem friends
Who'll float 'round the bends,
Adrift with poor Ernest on the Lethe.
Find out more about Ernest Bafflewit
July 2, 2014
ruzuzu commented on the word lethe
I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe. (It always makes me think of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.)
July 2, 2014