IONIC • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Ionic

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/aɪˈɑnɪk/ Listen

adjective

Ionic adj.

1.

Of or pertaining to Ionia or the Ionians.

2.

(Arch.) Pertaining to the Ionic order of architecture, one of the three orders invented by the Greeks, and one of the five recognized by the Italian writers of the sixteenth century. Its distinguishing feature is a capital with spiral volutes.

Ionic dialect (Gr. Gram.), a dialect of the Greek language, used in Ionia. The Homeric poems are written in what is designated old Ionic, as distinguished from new Ionic, or Attic, the dialect of all cultivated Greeks in the period of Athenian prosperity and glory.

Ionic foot. (Pros.) See Ionic, n., 1.

Ionic mode, or Ionian mode, (Mus.), an ancient mode, supposed to correspond with the modern major scale of C.

Ionic sect, a sect of philosophers founded by Thales of Miletus, in Ionia. Their distinguishing tenet was, that water is the original principle of all things.

Ionic type, a kind of heavy-faced type (as that of the following line). Note: This is Nonpareil Ionic.

ionic adj. (Chem.) Of or pertaining to ions; composed of ions, containing ions, or breaking down into ions when dissolved in a polar solvent; as, an ionic solution will conduct a current of electricity. Opposite of nonionic.

noun

Ionic n.

1.

(Pros.)

(a)

A foot consisting of four syllables: either two long and two short, that is, a spondee and a pyrrhic, in which case it is called the greater Ionic; or two short and two long, that is, a pyrrhic and a spondee, in which case it is called the smaller Ionic.

(b)

A verse or meter composed or consisting of Ionic feet.

2.

The Ionic dialect; as, the Homeric Ionic.

3.

(Print.) Ionic type.

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Etymology of 'Ionic'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Ionic" Quotes from Famous Books

... Virgilia passed out through the great row of Ionic columns and down the wide flight of steps into the bare, brown wind-swept landscapes ...

— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller

... beach with its fragments after every storm from the sea; and in a nodular mass of bluish-grey limestone derived from this subaqueous bed I laid open my first-found ammonite. It was a beautiful specimen, graceful in its curves as those of the Ionic volute, and greatly more delicate in its sculpturing; and its bright cream-coloured tint, dimly burnished by the prismatic hues of the original pearl, contrasted exquisitely with the dark grey of the matrix which enclosed it. I broke open many a similar nodule during our stay ...

— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... proportions of the different orders; the several diameters of their columns; their intercolumniations, their several uses, etc. The Corinthian Order is chiefly used in magnificent buildings, where ornament and decoration are the principal objects; the Doric is calculated for strength, and the Ionic partakes of the Doric strength, and of the Corinthian ornaments. The Composite and the Tuscan orders are more modern, and were unknown to the Greeks; the one is too light, the other too clumsy. You may soon be acquainted with the considerable parts of civil architecture; ...

— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... of the British Museum for the first time, the visitor will not fail to notice the Grecian Ionic facade, ornamented with forty-four columns, and rising at its extreme point to the height of sixty-six feet. The sculpture which decorates the tympanum of the portico is the work of Sir Richard Westmacott, and is an allegorical representation of the progress of civilisation. ...

— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... independent states, and the diversity of written dialects, the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks before them had obtained from the same causes with greater and more various discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic verses; the Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which were doubtless more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they ...

— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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