Allegory

How to spell allegory

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce allegory

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does allegory mean?

1. nounA story, image, or work in which characters and events stand for hidden moral, political, or spiritual meanings.

Allegory in a sentence

• The novel works as an allegory for the collapse of the old empire.

• The teacher explained that the fable is a simple allegory about greed.

Where does allegory come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Allegory comes from the Greek allegoria, meaning 'a speaking about something else', which was built from allos, meaning 'other', and agoreuein, 'to speak in public', a verb tied to the agora, the open marketplace where citizens gathered to talk. The literal idea was a piece of speech that says one thing on the surface while pointing to a hidden meaning underneath. Latin took the word in as allegoria, and it then passed into English through Old French during the late 1300s, around the era of medieval religious writing where stories routinely carried a second, moral layer. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the doubled 'll' near the start and the soft '-gory' ending both invite errors, since the stress falls on the first syllable and the rest collapses into a mumble. A useful memory hook is that the very same allos 'other' root also gives us 'allergy' and 'alias', all of them about otherness.

How the word is built

• alleg- (from Greek allos 'other'
• agoreuein 'to speak in public')
• -ory (noun suffix)