panegyric
noun
definition 1: a speech or piece of writing made in formal, elaborate praise of a person or thing.
example: Does she deserve this panegyric for doing something any good citizen would have done?
definition 2: something that serves to praise or extol.
example: The movie is the director’s panegyric to Hollywood in the 1930s.
Word History
The word “panegyric” comes from the classical Greek term logos panegyrikos meaning “a speech given at a public assembly or festival.” The word logos means “word” or “speech.” The Greek adjective panegyrikos combines the prefix pan-, meaning “all,” and agora, whose core meaning is “marketplace.”
Panegyric was a literary, oratorical form in ancient Greece. It typically praised the rulers and ancient cities of Greece on occasions such as the Olympic festival. The word passed from Greek to Latin to French and entered the English language around 1600, during the Renaissance.
Panegyrics were composed under the great monarchies in England, Spain, and France. The English poet John Dryden, for example, wrote “To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric On His Coronation” in 1661 to honor the restoration of Charles II to the throne.
Over time, the word “panegyric” was used more broadly to mean any extended expression of high praise. George Levine writes of Darwin’s last work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, published in 1881, that it “is almost a panegyric to worms, whose intelligence, skills, and digestive tracts anticipate human behavior and raise and swallow empires.” (George Levine, “Darwin and Pain: Why Science Made Shakespeare Nauseating,” Raritan Fall 95, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p. 97)
In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), one of Victor Frankenstein’s chemistry professors delivers a fateful panegyric on the powers of modern science:
After having made a few preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never forget: “The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818)