# acrostic

> English word · Noun · IPA /əˈkɹɒstɪk/ · frequency rank #83,947

## Definitions
1. A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.
2. A poem in Hebrew in which successive lines or verses start with consecutive letters of the alphabet.
3. A kind of word puzzle, whose solution forms an anagram of a quotation, with its initial letters often forming the name of the person quoted.
4. A kind of word puzzle in which a series of words are clued, and individual letters from the clued word spell out one or more additional words.

## Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French acrostiche, acrostique (“acrostic”) (modern French acrostiche), and its etymon Late Latin acrostichis, from Ancient Greek ἀκροστιχίς (akrostikhís), from ἄκρο- (ákro-, prefix indicating, among other things, the extremity or tip of something) + στῐ́χος (stĭ́khos, “row or file of soldiers; line of poetry, verse”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *steygʰ- (“to climb, go”)).

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/acrostic