Make Your Point > Archived Issues > TRIPTYCH
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pronounce
TRIPTYCH:
Say it "TRIP tick."
(It rhymes with "cryptic.")
To hear it, click here.
connect this word to others:
Hands up if you're old enough to remember the days before GPS!
If you were planning a road trip, you might plot your route in your spiral-bound Road Atlas from Rand McNally. Or, if you were blessed with a membership to AAA, you'd visit one of their offices and get yourself a really snazzy TripTik.
(Photo credit to CheeseWheels38 on Reddit!)
These little flip books of maps were so awesome, you guys. They showed your entire route, turn by turn, like Google Maps--frozen in time, yes, but never dropping that signal. Note the spiral binding at the top. It made each page squeak as if you flipped it, a pleasant little squeak of orderliness, of the trip ticking by.
It wasn't until many years after I'd stopped using TripTiks that I realized their name was a play on words. Whereas a TripTik is an item that ticks you along your trip, a triptych--pronounced the same way, but formed from tri-, "three," and the Late Greek ptykhe, "fold"--is an item that displays three parts. The original triptychs were ancient three-part writing tablets.
Check this out, from Encyclopaedia Britannica:
"These triptychs then were...three tablets of wood, cleft from one piece and fastened together, like the leaves of a book, by strings passed through two holes pierced near the edge."
Sounds like the ancient version of plastic spiral binding! But it probably didn't squeak!
Now what if your ancient writing tablet had two pieces, not three? That'd be a diptych.
Let's play with those words, diptych and triptych, putting them into context with some other related words. (As we do that, recall that the prefix meaning "two" can be spelled either "di-" or "bi-.")
Diptych is to triptych as...
...bicycle is to tricycle,
...biceps is to triceps,
...dichromatic is to trichromatic,
..._________ is to trichotomy, and
..._____________ is to tridirectional.
Could you name and define both of the missing words above?
(To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.)
definition:
Let's back up to the word "diptych," which means "something folded into two pieces." The word "diptych" came from Latin and has roots that mean "folded in two." It's been around in English since 1622 or so.
Flash forward to about 1732, when we realized it'd be handy to have a word meaning "folded in three."
So we invented "triptych," basing it off "diptych." (Italian and French did the same thing--they made their own versions, earlier than we did.)
In general, a triptych is something that has three sections, and usually it's something artistic.
It could be a piece of art in three pieces, or a card or tablet that folds out into three pieces, or a piece of music with three parts, or a movie shown on three screens. It can be anything that has three distinctive sections.
Especially if it reminds you of an artistic triptych, like the one below. (Thanks for the image, Wikipedia!)
Above, you can see how the two outside panels could fold over the bigger inside one. That's a common design for triptychs. But any work of art with three panels can be called a triptych. Like the one below. Yum.
To recap, a triptych is something that has three separate parts and is usually artistic (like a painting, a film, or a piece of music).
grammatical bits:
Part of speech: noun, the countable kind: "it's a beautiful triptych," "it's a triptych of images."
Other forms:
The plural is "triptychs."
Sometimes we use "triptych" loosely like an adjective: "it's a triptych painting."
how to use it:
Pick the formal, serious word "triptych" to describe any unit of three artistic, creative things. "He's painting a triptych." "We hung a triptych over our sofa." "These three operas form a triptych, a single overarching story." "The films form an intergalactic triptych."
Because the old ancient triptychs were bound like books, and because we often refer to book pages as "leaves," you can also talk about the individual "leaves" of a triptych. "The first leaf of the triptych depicts the journey's start." "The eye is drawn toward the triptych's center leaf." "The poem closes on a somber note, dark images filling this third leaf of the triptych."
That's some pretty serious stuff.
But you can be silly or sarcastic, and call things "a triptych of something" when they're not artistic, not creative. Here's Slate: "The games are choppy... a not insignificant chunk of NFL Sundays consist of the beer commercial–kickoff–truck commercial triptych of despair."
examples:
"A daring, irreverent triptych, 'Poison' is organized into discrete segments​—'​Hero,' 'Horror,' 'Homo'—in each of which society rejects the main character and destroys his sense of belonging."
— John Lahr, The New Yorker, 11 November 2019
"Midtown, Houston: This is a classic new Texas triptych. Balconies that aren't usable. Landscaping that is barely decorative, let alone functional. Even some surveillance capitalism, as a treat."
— Allyn West, Texas Observer, 5 March 2020
has this page helped you understand "triptych"?
study it:
Explain the meaning of "triptych" without saying "a three-part thing" or "a piece or display with three sections."
try it out:
Be serious or silly as you fill in the blanks: "It's a (certain kind of) triptych: _____, _____, and _____."
Example 1: "It's a handmade Hawaiian triptych: panels depicting a banyan tree, a bird of paradise, and a handful of plump macadamia nuts."
Example 2: "It's a movie-riffer's delight. It's got the whole triptych: a campy plot, a flimsy cast of characters, and paper-mache monsters dangling from thick black puppet strings."
before you review, play:
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
This month, our game is called "Recollections."
In each issue, I'll share a quote from some work--it might be a song, a poem, or a book--and you'll come up with that work's title. You can assemble the title, highlighted in the vertical blue line below, by recalling words to fit into the puzzle. Scrap paper might help!
From the previous issue:
"I'll tell you...what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!"
Those words appear in the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
If you'd like to review any of the words from the puzzle, give them a click: ignite, cadaverous, eclat, bane, dastardly, facet, nexus, madcap, kerfuffle, lacerate, tailspin, narcissist, hairsbreadth, raffish, maelstrom, quandary, saddled.
Try this one today:
"We must understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience, New Age thinking, and fundamentalist zealotry and the testable hypotheses of science."
In what work does the quote above appear?
1) adjective: "having a nice, rhythmic sound or movement"
2) noun: "talking that is loud, fast, rambling, and meaningless"
3) noun: "a feeling of being annoyed, offended, and/or angry, like what you'd feel if a certain evil professor at Hogwarts made you serve detention by carving words into your skin"
4) noun: "determination and boldness in a dangerous situation"
5) verb: "to become less strong, less intense, or less powerful, in a way that reminds you of the moon slowly shrinking into a teeny little fingernail clipping"
6) noun: "the process of pointing out tiny little detailed differences that are unimportant"
7) adjective: "done in an honest way, where everyone can see it"
8) adjective: "able to be counted or measured in units"
9) adjective: "brand new, or just now developing"
10) noun: "a shortage or a scarcity of anything valuable"
11) noun: "something spewed out in a fast, violent, overwhelming way, as if in a stream of bullets"
12) noun: "anything that moves in circles, or moves in its own direction, like a whirlpool in a body of water"
13) noun: "a situation leading toward an angry fight (if Xena is on this, soon she's gonna be shouting 'ALALALALALALALALAH')"
14) adjective: "totally unaware of what's happening around them"
15) noun: "the group of people who are leading the way with something"
16) adjective: "very easy to do or easy to use, and often without thought or effort"
17) verb: "to try to back up and fix a mistake, change what you said, or entirely take back what you said, as if trying to steer a bicycle in reverse"
review this word:
A. STAYCATION.
B. SINGLE PANEL.
C. CRYSTAL CLARITY.
2. The New York Times _____ this podcast episode, calling it "a triptych of _____."
A. highlights .. glamour and terror
B. razzes .. big egos on even bigger budgets
C. praises .. beautifully sound-designed documentaries
a final word:
I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.
I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.
From my blog:
36 ways to study words.
Why we forget words, & how to remember them.
How to use sophisticated words without being awkward.
To be a sponsor and include your ad in an issue, please contact me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.
Disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.
Hands up if you're old enough to remember the days before GPS!
Let's back up to the word "diptych," which means "something folded into two pieces." The word "diptych" came from Latin and has roots that mean "folded in two." It's been around in English since 1622 or so.
Part of speech: noun, the countable kind: "it's a beautiful triptych," "it's a triptych of images."
Pick the formal, serious word "triptych" to describe any unit of three artistic, creative things. "He's painting a triptych." "We hung a triptych over our sofa." "These three operas form a triptych, a single overarching story." "The films form an intergalactic triptych."
"A daring, irreverent triptych, 'Poison' is organized into discrete segments​—'​Hero,' 'Horror,' 'Homo'—in each of which society rejects the main character and destroys his sense of belonging."
Explain the meaning of "triptych" without saying "a three-part thing" or "a piece or display with three sections."
Be serious or silly as you fill in the blanks: "It's a (certain kind of) triptych: _____, _____, and _____."
Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.
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