Winged words are words which, first uttered or written in a specific literary context, have since passed into common usage to express a general idea—sometimes to the extent that those using them are unaware of their origin as quotations. The reference is to words, which having "taken wing" in this way, then fly from one person to another.
The expression—deriving from the Homeric phrase ἔπεα πτερόεντα (epea pteroenta) and now itself an example of "winged words"—was first employed systematically in this sense by the German philologist Georg Büchmann in his book Geflügelte Worte (1864). It was later taken up by Thomas Carlyle in an essay about Walter Scott.
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Famous quotes containing the words winged and/or word:
“Deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel, does the winged soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way; and finds eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)