Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In modern Greece, a nome; a nomarchy.
- noun In ancient Greek music, same as
nome .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The body of
law , especially that governing humanbehaviour .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word nomos.
Examples
-
The nomos is horribly corroded and encrusted with all sorts of gunk.
The present state of affairs is unsatisfactory « Isegoria 2008
-
His controversy with the Jews, the impossibility of understanding anything but the Jewish law under the word nomos, 'prevented St Paul from using the phrase, the inner law of duty.
The Beginnings of Christianity. Vol. I. 1872-1939 1903
-
In their classic efforts to answer this question, 5th-century Greek philosophers follow Homer in pondering how culture and nature (in Greek, nomos and phusis) relate to each other as they converge in human identity.
Claremont.org 2009
-
a laboured use of them; forced attempts at metaphor occur in several passages, — e.g. parocheteuein logois; ta men os tithemena ta d os paratithemena; oinos kolazomenos upo nephontos eterou theou; the plays on the word nomos = nou dianome, ode etara: fourthly, there is a foolish extravagance of language in other passages, — ‘the swinish ignorance of arithmetic;’
Laws 2006
-
Normal human conduct under given circumstances or for a particular kind of individual is described as nomos frequently by Euripides, who applies the term, for example, to the new standards of behavior which a woman has to adopt after marriage (Medea 238), to the rule to help the shipwrecked (Cyclops 299), to the love which all living creatures have for their offspring
Dictionary of the History of Ideas MARTIN OSTWALD 1968
-
Protagoras (337 C-D); it is only “nomos, which is a tyrant among men,” that has made the participants in the dialogue strangers to one another, since they come from different cities.
Dictionary of the History of Ideas CHARLES H. KAHN 1968
-
When class conflicts arose in the Greek city-states and philosophical reflec - tion grew on the cultural variety of moral codes, the notion of nomos became interpreted as merely cus - tomary in the sense of conventional.
RIGHT AND GOOD ABRAHAM EDEL 1968
-
In this 'mythus', Jove is the impersonated representation or symbol of the 'nomos' -- 'Jupiter est quodcunque vides'.
Literary Remains, Volume 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803
-
The same kind of nomos is apparently that of which the
Dictionary of the History of Ideas MARTIN OSTWALD 1968
-
A titular see, suffragan of Antinoe in Thebais Prima; the ancient Apu or Khimmin which the Greeks made Khemmis and Panopolis, capital of the Panopolitan "nomos" or district; one of the most important towns of Upper Egypt made famous by the god Mîn.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 11: New Mexico-Philip 1840-1916 1913
chained_bear commented on the word nomos
"Interestingly, the Greek word nomos, meaning 'law,' also has the musical meaning of 'melody.' To submit, bodily, to the music through dance is to be incorporated into the community in a way far deeper than shared myth or common custom can achieve. In synchronous movement to music or chanting voices, the petty rivalries and factional differences that might divide a group could be transmuted into harmless competition over one's prowess as a dancer, or forgotten. 'Dance,' as a neuroscientist put it, is 'the biotechnology of group formation.'"
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 24
March 12, 2009