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Definition: Laocoon |
LaocoonNoun1. (Greek mythology) the priest of Apollo who warned the Trojans to beware of Greeks bearing gifts when they wanted to accept the Trojan Horse; a god who favored the Greeks (Poseidon or Athena) sent snakes who coiled around Laocoon and his two twin sons killing them. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "Laocoon" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1822. (references) |
| Domain | Definitions |
Satire | LAOCOON, n. A famous piece of antique scripture representing a priest of that name and his two sons in the folds of two enormous serpents. The skill and diligence with which the old man and lads support the serpents and keep them up to their work have been justly regarded as one of the noblest artistic illustrations of the mastery of human intelligence over brute inertia. Source: Devil's Dictionary. |
Biographical Satire | LAOCOON, a Trojan priest who suffered with delirium tremens. Together with his sons he posed for his statue while encumbered with a bad attack. Address: Vatican, Rome. Source: Who was Who: 5000BC - 1914. |
Literature | Laocoon [La-ok'-o-on ]. A son of Priam, famous for the tragic fate of himself and his two sons, who were crushed to death by serpents. The group representing these three in their death agony, now in the Vatican, was discovered in 1506, on the Esquiline Hill (Rome). It is a single block of marble, and was the work of Agesander of Rhodes and two other sculptors. Thomson has described the group in his Liberty, pt. iv. (Virgil Æneid, ii. 40 etc., 212 etc.) "The miserable sire, Wrapped with his sons in Fate's severest grasp" Source: Brewer's Dictionary. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Laocoön was a priest of Poseidon at Troy who was killed along with his sons by Poseidon for trying to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse. He threw his spear at the wooden horse and was torn apart by a sea serpent sent from the gods to kill him.
The great sculpture of "Laocoön and his Sons" now in the Vatican museum was attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Hegesandros, Athenedoros, and Polydoros. The date - whether the sculpture is 2nd century B.C. or A.D. 1st century - is widely controverted in the field of classical art history. Pliny tells us that the sculpture was in the palace of the emperor Titus. When the fragments were discovered in the 16th century, Michelangelo was commissioned to restore the statue.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Laocoon."
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Sculpture | Marble, bronze, terra cotta, papier-mache; ceramic ware, pottery, porcelain, china, earthenware; cloisonne, enamel, faience, Laocoon, satsuma. |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
| Domain | Title |
Books | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Thumbnail | Description & Credit | Thumbnail | Description & Credit |
 | Laocoon vetusti operis trium artificum Rhodiorum ex hortis Vaticanis. / Waldreich sc.Credit: National Library of Medicine. |  | Laocoon, 1938.Credit: Library of Congress. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Title | Author | Quote |
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Joyce, James | The Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
| "Laocoon" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 75.00% of the time. "Laocoon" is used about 8 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 75% | 6 | 143,867 |
| Noun (proper) | 25% | 2 | 245,945 |
| Total | 100.00% | 8 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day |
laocoon | 36 |
group laocoon | 7 |
laocoon logo | 3 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
| Words rhyming with "Laocoon" (pronounced 'La*oc"o*["o]n'): Actinozoon, Ectozoon, Entozoon, Eozoon, Epiploon, Epizoon, Haematozoon, Hydrozoon, Metazoon, Phytozoon, Polyzoon, Protozoon, Spermatoon, Teleozoon, Zoon. (additional references) |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-c-l-n-o-o-o" | |
-2 letters: colon. | |
-3 letters: calo, clan, clon, coal, cola, cool, coon, loan, loca, loco, loon, nolo. | |
-4 letters: can, col, con, coo, lac, loo, noo, oca. | |
-5 letters: al, an, la, lo, na, no, on. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-c-l-n-o-o-o" | |
+3 letters: coloration, gonococcal, monoclonal, nosocomial, oceanology. | |
+4 letters: collocation, colorations, condolatory, consolation, consolatory, monoclonals, neocolonial, nomological, nosological, notochordal, oncological, ontological, volcanology. | |
+5 letters: collocations, colonisation, colonization, colorization, conglobation, consolations, consolidator, cosmogonical, cosmopolitan, echolocation, fluorocarbon, iconological, nonalcoholic, nonclassroom, noncolorfast, oceanologies, oceanologist, phonological, postcolonial, volcanologic. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
Hexadecimal (or equivalents, 770AD-1900s) (references)4C 61 6F 63 6F 6F 6E |
| Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519; backwards) (references)
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| American Sign Language (origins from 1620-1817 in Italy and, especially, France) (references)
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| Semaphore (1791, in France) (references)
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| Braille (1829, in France) (references)
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Morse Code (1836) (references).-.. .- --- -.-. --- --- -. |
| Dancing Men (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903) (references)
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Binary Code (1918-1938, probably earlier) (references)01001100 01100001 01101111 01100011 01101111 01101111 01101110 |
HTML Code (1990) (references)L a o c o o n |
ISO 10646 (1991-1993) (references)004C 0061 006F 0063 006F 006F 006E |
| British Sign Language (Fingerspelling, BSL; 1992, British Deaf Association Dictionary of British Sign Language) (references)
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Encryption (beginner's substitution cypher): (references)46678169818180 |
| 1. Definition 2. Usage: Commercial 3. Images: Slideshow 4. Images: Photo Album | 5. Quotations: Fiction 6. Usage Frequency 7. Expressions: Internet 8. Rhymes | 9. Anagrams 10. Orthography 11. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
