Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Morpheus |
MorpheusNoun1. (Ovid) the Roman god of sleep and dreams. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
"Morpheus" is a name that signifies or is derived from: "the shapes". |
Date "Morpheus" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1374. (references) |
Etymology: Morpheus \Mor"pheus\, noun. [Latin expression, from the Greek expression prop., the fashioner or molder, because of the shapes he calls up before the sleeper, from form, shape.]. (references) |
| Domain | Definition |
Literature | Morpheus (2 syl., the Sleeper). Son of Sleep, and god of dreams: so called because he gives these airy nothings their form and fashion. Source: Brewer's Dictionary. |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Death is one of the Endless, fictional characters from Neil Gaiman's comic book series, The Sandman.She is second eldest of the family, younger only than Destiny. She is portrayed as a young woman, preferring to wear casual clothes, usually black - often a black top and jeans. She wears a silver ankh on a chain around her neck; this is the sigil by which she is represented in the galleries of the other Endless. Death's realm is not portrayed in the series, except for a brief scene in her 'house' in the Sandman Special, Song of Orpheus. This is where she keeps her floppy hat collection and her goldfish, Slim and Wandsworth.
Death is one of the most popular characters in the series. Gaiman took great pleasure in creating a portrayal of Death that is entirely convincing yet completely at odds with the traditional anthropomorphic personifications of Death, particularly in English culture, where Death is conventionally depicted as an intimidating skeleton in a black robe bearing a scythe - the Grim Reaper. Death is easily the most personable and pleasant of the Endless, a happy, sympathetic, down-to-earth woman who acts for the most part as an anchor and confidant for Morpheus (Dream). Two of the key passages in the series feature Death and Morpheus together, at the end of Preludes and Nocturnes, where she gives him direction and a degree of understanding, and at the end of The Kindly Ones, where she gives him peace.
Death also features in two mini-series', Death: The High Cost of Living, and Death: The Time of Your Life, as well as the manga Death: At Death's Door which seems to be the first of a series.
Related Topics
- Characters in The Sandman
- Death (personification)
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Death (Sandman)."
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Dream is one of the Endless, fictional characters from Neil Gaiman's comic book series, The Sandman.Spoilers follow
He is given many names in the series, including Morpheus and Oneiros (within Wikipedia he is generally referred to as Morpheus). It is known that the Endless have many aspects, one of which is the personification active at any one time, and if one aspect dies, another replaces it. One particular aspect of Dream is the central character of the series, so referring to this aspect of Dream as Morpheus differentiates him from Dream as a whole. When the aspect known as Morpheus dies at the end of The Kindly Ones, the ninth collection of issues in the series, he is replaced by a new aspect, which used to be a child of Morpheus' aspect called Daniel. This is a tricky concept, encapsulated in the tenth and final collection, The Wake, when one character at Morpheus' wake, perplexed by the question of who exactly has died, is told by another that the purpose of the wake is to mourn "a point of view". The other Endless remain personified by the same aspect throughout the series, so they are simply referred to by the generic names.
Morpheus is usually presented as a tall, thin, pale-skinned and black haired man, who has been noted vaguely to resemble the lead singer of The Cure, Robert Smith.
When interacting with individual mortals, he appears in a guise appropriate to the mortal. For instance, in the story "Tales in the Sand" he interacts with the ancestors of a black aboriginal tribe, and is depicted as a black man called Kai'Ckul. He is once also depicted as a cat, in the issue "Dream of a Thousand Cats", and once as partway between a cat and a human, when talking to the feline goddess Bast. In the story "Men of Good Fortune", Dream is seen at different times in the last 500 years; his costume is a little more conventional than the modern Dream, but still with an air of eccentricity. In one popular sequence in the issue "The Parliament of Rooks", he and his elder sister Death are depicted as cartoon-style children.
He invariably wears black, except when wearing his formal costume, which involves purple and blue. He has a helmet, which he seems to wear on occasions of great importance; this is his sigil in the galleries of the other Endless. Morpheus lives in a castle within his realm. Both the castle and the rest of the realm are mutable and change often, at Morpheus' will; but parts of both the castle and the realm are maintained in constant form as a courtesy to its inhabitants. It is perhaps significant that Morpheus is the only one of the Endless known to populate his realm - many other characters live there, including Abel and Cain. He even creates (and in some cases recruits) servants to perform roles he could easily carry out himself, including the reorganisation of the castle and the guarding of its entrance. This perhaps points at an essential loneliness in Morpheus' character.
Dream is a noble, tragic hero, very much in the traditional style of heroes of Greek tragedy. He is sometimes slow, a little at sea when dealing with humour, occasionally insensitive and often self-obsessed. (As Mervyn Pumpkinhead remarks, when one of Morpheus' invariably disastrous romances ends, "He's gotta be the tragic figure standing out in the rain, mournin' the loss of his beloved. So down comes the rain, right on cue. In the meantime everybody gets dreams fulla existential angst and wakes up feeling like hell. And we all get wet.") On the other hand, he is consistently aware of his responsibilties, both those to other people and those that go with his (for want of a better word) territory, which makes him both dependable and fair-minded. He shares a close, reciprocal bond of dependence and trust with his elder sister, Death. He consistently strives for understanding, most particularly of himself and of the other Endless, but is ultimately defeated by his most tragic flaw, his inability to consciously change himself and to recognise and accept the change that inevitably occurs at an unconscious level. As Lucien remarks in The Wake when asked (by Matthew, the raven) "Why did it happen? Why did he let it happen?", "Charitably...I think...sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change."
See also Characters in The Sandman and Sandman (comics).
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Dream (Sandman)."
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Morpheus can have several meanings:
- A God that is a member of the Greek pantheon; see Morpheus (god).
- A file sharing client operated by the company StreamCast; see Morpheus (computer program).
- A fictional character from Neil Gaiman's comic book series The Sandman; see Morpheus (Sandman character).
- A fictional character from the movie The Matrix; see Morpheus (Matrix character).
- A fictional character from the comic Little Nemo; see Morpheus (Little Nemo character).
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Morpheus."
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Morpheus is the name of a file sharing client operated by the company StreamCast (formerly called MusicCity) that originally used the OpenNAP peer-to-peer (P2P) platform.Located at Morpheus.com, it has a web-based search interface, just like Audiogalaxy, though Morpheus searches all kinds of media, not just MP3s. In 2001, Morpheus changed protocol from OpenNAP to FastTrack. On February 26 2002, all Morpheus clients suddenly stopped working when the FastTrack protocol was updated and Morpheus users no longer were allowed to log into the network. This was apparently because of licensing disputes between StreamCast and the owners of FastTrack. On March 2, a new, less-robust Morpheus client using Gnutella as its P2P medium was released.
For other meanings of the name Morpheus, see Morpheus.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Morpheus (computer program)."
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Morpheus ("he who forms, shapes, molds") is the principal Greek god of dreams. His father was Hypnos, god of sleep. Morpheus had the ability to take any human's form and appeared in dreams as your loved ones. His brothers Icelus, Phobetor and Phantasos were the other Oneiroi. He was mentioned in the Metamorphoses of Ovid and lived on a bed made of ebony in a dark cave decorated with poppy flowers.The drug morphine derives its name from Morpheus based on its similar dream-inducing power.
Morpheus is the main character in Neil Gaiman's comic book The Sandman.
For other meanings of the name Morpheus, see Morpheus.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Morpheus (god)."
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Morpheus is the name of a fictional character (played by Laurence Fishburne) in the science fiction film, The Matrix.The Wachowski brothers, writers and directors of The Matrix films were fans of Neil Gaiman and based the character of Morpheus on the title character from The Sandman, also adopting one of his most common pseudonyms, Morpheus. They gave Fishburne some or all of the Sandman series to read, and the style of speech and mannerism of the Matrix character are heavily informed by the Sandman character, although since The Sandman is only a graphic novel, much of the tone and inflection is an original (though recognizable) interpretative creation on Fishburne's part. This connection is hinted at again in Enter the Matrix when Niobe calls Daniels Institute of dreams to get in touch with Morpheus.
There is also an oblique reference in Morpheus' name to the character of Orpheus in classical mythology. In Greek myth, Orpheus is known as the only living mortal to successfully visit the underworld and return alive; while the Matrix character Morpheus successfully travels between the "real world" and the world of the Matrix without penalty.
For other meanings of the name Morpheus, see Morpheus.
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Morpheus (Matrix character)."
| Context | Synonyms within Context (source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus). |
Inactivity | Sleeping; Verb: asleep; fast asleep, dead asleep, sound asleep; in a sound sleep; sound as a top, dormant, comatose; in the arms of Morpheus, in the lap of Morpheus. |
Sleep, slumber; sound sleep, heavy sleep, balmy sleep; Morpheus; Somnus; coma, trance, ecstasis, dream, hibernation, nap, doze, snooze, siesta, wink of sleep, forty winks, snore; hypnology. | |
| Source: adapted from Roget's Thesaurus. | |
Crosswords: Morpheus |
| English words defined with "Morpheus": Morphean. (references) |
| Specialty definitions using "Morpheus": Trite Expressions. (references) |
| Non-English Usage: "Morpheus" is also a word in the following language with the English translation in parentheses. Dutch (Morpheus). |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | Morpheus believes he is the one. (The Matrix; writing credit: Andy Wachowski; Larry Wachowski) The great Morpheus. We meet at last (The Matrix; writing credit: Andy Wachowski; Larry Wachowski) It's Morpheus. He just called (Enter the Matrix; writing credit: Andy Wachowski; Larry Wachowski) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Morpheus Mike (1915) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title | ||
Books | |||
Music |
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High Tech |
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Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| "Morpheus" is generally used as a noun (proper) -- approximately 80.00% of the time. "Morpheus" is used about 5 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 (proper) | 80% | 4 | 175,879 |
| Noun (plural) | 20% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 5 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
Expressions using "Morpheus": in the arms of morpheus ♦ in the lap of Morpheus. Additional references. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; 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. |
| Language | Translations for "Morpheus"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Albanian | Morfej. (various references) | |
Dutch | Morpheus. (various references) | |
Esperanto | Morfeo. (various references) | |
Farsi | خواب پرور. (various references) | |
French | Morphée. (various references) | |
Greek | όορφέασ, όορφεύσ, ύπνοσ (sleep). (various references) | |
Hungarian | Morfeusz. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | orpheusmay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | morfeu. (various references) | |
Russian | Морфей. (various references) | |
Serbo-Croatian | morfej. (various references) | |
Spanish | Morfeo. (various references) | |
Turkish | Rüya Tanrısı. (various references) | |
Vietnamese | thần ngủ đang ngủ say sưa. (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Words rhyming with "Morpheus" (pronounced 'Mor"pheus'): Cepheus. (additional references) |
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "e-h-m-o-p-r-s-u" | |
-1 letter: supremo, uphroes. | |
-2 letters: ephors, homers, hopers, houser, humors, mohurs, mopers, morphs, mosher, mouser, musher, ouphes, poseur, posher, proems, pusher, rheums, uphroe, uprose. | |
-3 letters: ephor, euros, hemps, herms, heros, hoers, homer, homes, hoper, hopes, horse, hours, house, humor, humps, meous, mohur, moper, mopes, mores, morph, morse, moues, mouse, mures, muser, omers, ouphe, ouphs, perms. | |
| Words containing the letters "e-h-m-o-p-r-s-u" | |
+2 letters: supermacho. | |
+3 letters: champertous, hemipterous, homopterous, promethiums, pseudomorph, supermachos, supersmooth. | |
+4 letters: archesporium, consumership, pneumographs, pseudomorphs. | |
+5 letters: amorphousness, camphoraceous, consumerships, hymenopterous, pseudomorphic, thermocouples, thermophilous. | |
| 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. | |
| 1. Definition 2. Crosswords 3. Usage: Modern 4. Usage: Commercial | 5. Usage Frequency 6. Expressions 7. Expressions: Internet 8. Translations: Modern | 9. Rhymes 10. Anagrams 11. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
