epitaph

plural epitaphs

1. An inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.

   2 more examples

   The church itself, or at all events the squat and tiny tower, has not altered much since Lamb saw it. But the epitaphs have gone. Search among the ivies and yews of the shady little churchyard will discover a number of flat, weatherworn slabs of stone, but the verses and the signatures have vanished.

   1909, Eric Parker, chapter XXIII, in Highways and Byways in Surrey

   Ayot St Lawrence's most famous inhabitant, George Bernard Shaw, moved into the New Rectory in 1906 because, it is said, of a gravestone epitaph in the churchyard. This recorded the death of a woman who lived to be 70 with the comment 'Her time was short'. Shaw thought that a place that considered a life of 70 years short was the right place for him.

   1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 44

2. A poem or other short text written in memory of a deceased person.

   338 ♦ Live your life so that your epitaph could read, “No regrets.”

   1991, Life's Little Instruction Book: 511 Suggestions, Observations, and Reminders on How to Live a Happy and Rewarding Life, H. Jackson Brown Jr., published by Rutledge Hill Press

   1 more example

   Nam vinci in amore turpissimum putant, not only living, but when their friends are dead, with tombs and monuments, nenias, epitaphs, elegies, inscriptions, pyramids, obelisks, statues, images, pictures, histories, poems, annals, feasts, anniversaries, many ages after (as Plato's scholars did) they will parentare still, omit no good office that may tend to the preservation of their names, honours, and eternal memory.

   1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], “Honest Objects of Love”, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, […], Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC

present singular third person epitaphs · participle present epitaphing · participle past epitaphed · past epitaphed

1. intransitiveTo write or speak after the manner of an epitaph.

   The Commons in their speeches epitaph upon him […] "He lived as a wolf and died as a dog."

   1606, Joseph Hall, Heaven upon Earth

2. transitiveTo commemorate by an epitaph.

   Let me rather be epitaphed the inventor of the English Hexameter.

   1592, Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets