Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today,

we're going to talk about why people are confused about how to use the word epitome, and then

we'll have some spring fun talking about baby animal names. Epitome is one of those words whose pronunciation can

mess you up if you learned it from reading instead of from hearing people say it. The word is

spelled E-P-I-T-O-M-E, and a lot of young readers end up thinking it's pronounced epitome instead of epitome, because a lot of other

words that start with EPI or pronounced that way, epicenter, epidemic, epidermis, and so on. And a lot of

these people don't realize their mistake until years and years later. But I recently came across some interesting changes in meaning the

word has been going through too. First, epitome comes from Greek, where as a noun, it meant

summary or an abridgment, and as a verb, it meant to cut short. And it first meant the same

thing in English, a summary. For example, in a book

describing some letters in 1698, the writer said, it's very difficult to give an abstract or

epitome of them. And here's a funny quotation from William Sclater, a British clergyman in 1623.

This age is strangely in love with epitomies.

It feels like it could have been written just last week

about services that summarize books like Blinkist

or people who use chat GPT to generate a lot of summaries.

Now, I've never even heard this summarizing meaning. The meaning

I know for epitome is a representative or example of a class or type, as in Squiggly is the

epitome of chocolate-loving snails. But it seems like it wasn't that long ago that the summary meaning started to fade.

The American Heritage Dictionary used to have a usage panel made up of language experts who would

vote and comment on controversial usages. Well, in 2004, they were asked to weigh in on the word epitome, and 20% of the panel still rejected this sentence.

Their business model is the epitome of efficiency.

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