acrostic

noun

1. (also, attributive)A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.

   “I have written an acroſticke ſonet to his Maieſtie, a canzonet to the Queene, and another acroſticke unto the Prince; whoſe ſervant I am by vow, and ſubordinate ſubject by birth.”

   “[L]et him that is melancholy […] apply his minde I ſay to Heraldry, Antiquity, invent Impreſſes, Emblemes; make Epithalamiums, Epitaphs, Elegies, Epigrams, Palindrona Epigrammata, Anagrams, Chronograms, Acroſticks, upon his friends names; […]”

   “And afterwards gives as many reaſons for it, as there are letters in Hibernaculum Ciconiarum, and that too in the Acrostick way, each ſentence beginning with a letter of thoſe words, according to their order.”

   “There is a most crying dullness on both sides. I have seen tory acrostics and whig anagrams, and do not quarrel with either of them, because they are whigs or tories, but because they are anagrams and acrostics.”

2. (also, attributive)A poem in Hebrew in which successive lines or verses start with consecutive letters of the alphabet.

   “The Whole [of the Book of Zephaniah] is wrote in a very lively, tender, and pathetic Stile; and all the Chapters, except the laſt, (which ſeems to have been of later Compoſition than the reſt) are in Acroſtick Verſe, i.e. every Line, or Couplet, begins, in an Alphabetical Order, with ſome Letter in the Hebrew Alphabet.”

   “Each of the five chapters of the Lamentations contains a distinct elegy, according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. And in the first four chapters the versification resembles acrostics. In the three first chapters each verse consists of three lines, and the initial letters of each verse are in the order of the Hebrew alphabet, with the exception that i. 7, and ii. 19, consist of five lines.”

   “The psalm is an individual thanksgiving that publicizes the psalmist as an encouragement for all who struggle to remain loyal to their God. It is in acrostic form in which every line begins with a successive letter of the twenty-two letter Hebrew alphabet. […] The acrostic form perhaps explains why the specificity one expects in a thanksgiving is diluted.”

3. (also, attributive)A kind of word puzzle, whose solution forms an anagram of a quotation, with its initial letters often forming the name of the person quoted.

   “those who rack their brains in solving the Acrostics in our Sunday papers will, perchance, be saved many a rack and many a failure by our reverse alphabetical arrangement”

   “For those of you who are new to acrostics, here is what to do. Your goal is to figure out the quote in the grid. […] Reading down the first letter of each answer spells the name of the author and the title of the work from which the quote was taken.”

4. (also, attributive)A kind of word puzzle in which a series of words are clued, and individual letters from the clued word spell out one or more additional words.

adj

1. (also, attributive)Of or pertaining to acrostics.

   “Other ancients have suggested that the original verses were written in hieroglyphs and also mentioned the acrostic code.”