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Achilles

proper nounattested in dialogue

  • United States//əˈkɪliːz//

A mythical semidivine hero, the son of Peleus by the nereid Thetis, and prince of the Myrmidons, who features in the Iliad as a central character and the foremost warrior of the Achaean (Greek) camp.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A mythical semidivine hero, the son of Peleus by the nereid Thetis, and prince of the Myrmidons, who features in the Iliad as a central character and the foremost warrior of the Achaean (Greek) camp.

    Achilles! a drayman, a porter, a very camel.

    Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

    If once the lamentation is heard, it will ring out again, of the short-lived Achilles, of the leaf-like change and vicissitude of the human race, of the decay of the heroic age.

    In the last third of the Iliad, Achilles’ beloved companion, Patroklos, and his bitter enemy, Hektor, die wearing Achilles’ armor, their deaths prefiguring Achilles’ own.

  2. 2

    rareA male given name from Ancient Greek.

  3. 3

    The Greek camp Trojan asteroid 588 Achilles.

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin Achillēs, from Ancient Greek Ἀχιλλεύς (Akhilleús).

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).