Word of the Day

: January 23, 2015

anabasis

noun uh-NAB-uh-sis

What It Means

1 : a going or marching up : advance; especially : a military advance

2 : a difficult and dangerous military retreat

anabasis in Context

Reluctantly, the general ordered a hasty anabasis in the face of overwhelming opposing forces.

"This German and Austro-Hungarian withdrawal from the Balkan Peninsula in the autumn of 1918 would presage a similar German anabasis…." - R. C. Hall, Balkan Breakthrough, 2010

Did You Know?

The first sense of anabasis follows logically enough from its roots. In Greek, the word originally meant "inland march"; it is derived from anabainein, meaning "to go up or inland," which is formed by combining the prefix ana- ("up") and bainein ("to go"). The second and opposite sense, however, comes from an anabasis gone wrong. In 401 B.C., Greek mercenaries fighting for Cyrus the Younger marched into the Persian Empire only to find themselves cut off hundreds of miles from home. As a result, they were forced to undertake an arduous and embattled retreat across unknown territories. Xenophon, a Greek historian who accompanied the mercenaries on the march, wrote the epic narrative Anabasis about this experience, and consequently anabasis came to mean a dramatic retreat as well as an advance.