genii
- 1Plural of genie.
Ancient tales describe genii bound to serve whoever holds the enchanted ring.
The magician summoned a host of genii to raise his palace overnight.
Note
Here the spelling belongs to genie: the jinn of Arabian lore, or the magical being bound to whoever holds its container. The regular plural genies is now the everyday choice. Genii has a more antique, esoteric flavor, as in Rollo Ahmed's The Black Art (1936), with its "spirits of the Genii order." Only context separates it from the mythological guardian spirits.
- 2Guardian spirits, each believed to watch over a particular person, place, or household.
Comparable to guardian angels in later tradition, tied to a single person from birth.
Each Roman household honored its genii with small altars and daily offerings.
The poet invoked the genii of the city before beginning his dedication.
Note
Roman religion gave every person, family and place a tutelary spirit, its genius, and in this sense the word keeps its Latin plural, genii, rather than geniuses. The word also carries over into art for the figures themselves. Colin Thubron, writing in 1980, describes winged genii painted on an eleventh-century glass bowl beside nude athletes and brawny soldiers.
- 3People who are exceptionally intelligent or unusually skilled at something.
The committee of self-styled genii spent an hour failing to set up the projector.
It aint oftin that you’s git a more better group of genii as was collected this year at good old Melrose High. To the credit of they, it can be said them didn’t do nothin’.
1973, “Honor Society”, in Kathie Ahern et al.Similarmasterminds, prodigies, brains
Note
A joke plural: treating genius as if it were still Latin dresses clever people in mock-classical robes. It turns up in school yearbooks, including Melrose High's 1973 Log, amid deliberately mangled grammar, and in Tara Flynn's comic Giving Out Yards (2015). Outside a joke the plural is geniuses, so reach for genii only when the irony is meant to show.
- 4Comparable spirits or supernatural beings found in mythologies other than the Roman, filling a similar guardian or attendant role.
Scholars group the protective genii of various ancient cultures under one comparative heading.
In Persian and Arabian lore, genii inhabit deserts and ruins far from human settlements.
Note
Folklorists extended the Roman spirits to other mythologies. Thomas Keightley's The Fairy Mythology (1828) speaks of a "race of genii" inhabiting Iceland, governed on the same pattern as the people around them. Take care not to blur this sense with the plural of genie. The two share a spelling, but genie names the jinn, while these genii are guardian spirits found in any culture.
- 5Plural of genus. Nonstandard; the usual plural is genera.
The survey recorded dozens of insect genii across the wetland.
Botanists debated whether the two genii should be merged into one.
Note
A slip to avoid in careful writing. The established plural of genus is genera, whether the word is used for a rank in biology, a broader category in logic, or a measure of complexity in mathematics. Genii comes from the analogy of radius and radii, but genus does not follow that pattern. A botanist writing of two genii will be read as mistaken, or as discussing spirits.
Practice
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