epic

Pluralepics

1. 1
   adjective

   Heroic in a momentous way, or grand in scale or character.

   The miners' epic struggle to dig out their trapped colleagues lasted eleven days.

   Shackleton's crew survived an epic journey across the frozen Southern Ocean in a small open boat.

   Similarheroic, monumental, massive, colossal, grand

   Oppositeminor, trivial

   Note

   Heroism and sheer size both live in this sense: an epic defense earns medals, while China's epic traffic jam, in an Agence France-Presse headline of 2010, was merely enormous. Before words like struggle, defense or journey it keeps its heroic note; before jam, backlog or queue it means only vast, and the grandeur turns faintly ironic.

2. 2
   amazingadjectiveslang

   Extremely impressive or remarkable, far beyond the ordinary.

   Her guitar solo at the end of the show was absolutely epic.

   Did you see that catch? Epic.

   Similarremarkable, extraordinary

   Oppositelame, mediocre, unremarkable

   Note

   Here the word is slang of pure admiration, at home in speech, texts and quick replies among friends, and it can stand alone as an exclamation: Epic. It only ever praises. In formal writing it sounds flippant, and remarkable or extraordinary does the same job without the slang.

3. 3
   big adventurenouncountable

   A series of events worthy of an epic poem, or any book, film, or other work that takes heroic deeds and adventures as its subject.

   The studio spent a fortune on its new war epic, complete with thousands of extras.

   Getting the piano up four flights of stairs became an epic the neighbors still talk about.

   Similarsaga, odyssey

   Note

   Away from poetry, the word names any big story of struggle and adventure, and a word in front often sets the genre: a war epic, a four-volume epic. The tone can turn wry, as when David Gunston, in Railway Magazine in 1958, described film epics that "nearly always had runaway trains" and a collapsed bridge just ahead.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A long narrative poem in elevated or dignified language that celebrates the deeds of a god, demigod, legendary figure, or traditional hero.

   Bards once performed the epic from memory over several nights.

   Generations of scholars have compared the great epics of Greece and India.

   Note

   The name goes back through French épique and Latin epicus to Greek epos, "word, story", so at heart an epic is a story told aloud, long enough that an Icelandic one might take all night to recite. English sometimes borrows epos itself, or epopee, for the same kind of poem, and heroic epic is the narrower name for one centered on a demigod.

5. 5
   extremeadjectiveslang

   Going well beyond what is usual or ordinary.

   Forgetting the rings on the wedding day was an epic blunder.

   The sequel was an epic fail, and the studio quietly canceled the series.

   Similarextraordinary, remarkable

   Oppositeminor, ordinary

   Note

   In casual speech the word stops measuring and starts intensifying: an epic party, an epic mistake, an epic fail. Unlike the grand, heroic meaning, it brings no nobility with it, so a blunder can sound as huge as a triumph, and only the context says whether the speaker is praising or mocking.

6. 6
   adjective

   Relating to an epic, such as a long narrative poem about heroic deeds.

   Long, elaborate similes are a familiar feature of epic verse.

   She wrote her thesis on the epic tradition of West Africa.

   Similarheroic

   Note

   This is the classifying adjective of literary study: epic poetry, epic verse, the epic tradition. It places a work in a genre rather than praising it, so Beowulf is an epic poem by kind, not by verdict; the praise belongs to the grand, heroic meaning. Epical means the same and is used the same way.

7. 7
   software tasknouncountable

   In software engineering, a large or extended user story.

   The product owner broke the onboarding epic into a dozen user stories for the next sprint.

   Some teams track epics on a separate board from their everyday user stories.

   Note

   In agile planning an epic is a container rather than a task: it is decomposed into child user stories, and the team builds those stories, not the epic itself. That is why epics usually sit on a separate list or board from ordinary stories, and why one counts as done only when all of its stories are.

8. 8
   mathematicsadjective

   Of a morphism in category theory, being an epimorphism.

   Every surjective homomorphism of groups is epic.

   In the category of rings, the inclusion of the integers into the rationals is epic but not surjective.

   Similarepimorphic

   Note

   Category theorists shorten epimorphism to this adjective: a morphism f is epic when it cancels on the right, so that g ∘ f = h ∘ f forces g = h. The idea generalizes being onto, though in some categories the two come apart. Despite the spelling, it has nothing to do with the heroic poem; it is built on Greek epi-, "on top of".

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