lyric \LEER-ik\ Adjective 1: suitable for singing : melodic
2: expressing direct usually intense personal emotion
EXAMPLES
The critics are praising Jessica's debut novel
as a lyric masterpiece that bravely lays out the emotional tensions
experienced by its young protagonist.
"Virtually all of Big Jim’s lyric digressions
were on writers. When Big Jim talked about Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman or
whomever, he spoke and we listened and learned." — Frank Clancy, Savannah
Morning News, September 23, 2014
DID YOU KNOW? To the ancient Greeks, anything lyrikos was
appropriate to the lyre. That elegant stringed instrument was highly regarded
by the Greeks and was used to accompany intensely personal poetry that revealed
the thoughts and feelings of the poet. When the adjective lyric, a
descendant of lyrikos, was adopted into English in the 1500s, it
too referred to things pertaining or adapted to the lyre. Initially, it was
applied to poetic forms (such as elegies, odes, or sonnets) that expressed
strong emotion, to poets who wrote such works, or to things that were meant to
be sung; over time, it was extended to anything musical or rhapsodic.
Nowadays, lyric is also used as a noun naming either a type of
poem or the words of a song.
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