Meaning
A person or thing of unique excellence, or anything that rises renewed from its own destruction - the one-of-its-kind bird that burns and returns. The word serves both the incomparable and the rebuilt, sometimes in the same sentence. Both senses stay live - match the one meant by context; the 500-year cycle and Herodotus's disbelief are the story's best details, and the Greek coin of 1828-32 makes the phoenix numismatic too. Regional use: General English; Egyptian-Greek origin.
Origin
Herodotus, sceptical as ever, reports the Egyptian story: a sacred bird, seen only in pictures, appearing once in five hundred years, when the old phoenix dies, partly red and golden, eagle-sized, flying from Arabia with its parent encased in a ball of myrrh to bury at the temple of the Sun. Pliny logged claimed appearances - 36 AD, 47 AD, exhibited at Rome's eight-hundredth anniversary, though he doubted that one - and the fiery death and rebirth from ashes grew later, Dante among its witnesses. The Greek name reaches back to the Egyptian bnw, the grey heron of the Nile floods, a bird of cyclical renewal. English found figurative uses early: the word meant an excellent person by the twelfth century; Shakespeare burned the long-lived phoenix in her blood in Sonnet 19; Landon called a young man that modern phoenix, without a single objection, in 1838; George Eliot doubted a phoenix of cleverness; and Australian company law now battles phoenixing, the transfer of assets out of a doomed firm to its own reborn twin.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a phoenix of
- phoenixing
- rise like a phoenix from the ashes
Usage Examples
- The docks rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the 1974 silos, cafes where the cranes had been.
- He was hailed as a phoenix of the trade: the only dealer who could restring a harpsichord before lunch.
- After the third administration in a decade, the club has phoenixing down to a fine art.