lyra
Plurallyras
- 1A hoop suspended vertically from above, used by performers for acrobatic and aerial dance routines.
The acrobat spun gracefully inside the lyra high above the crowd.
Two performers shared a single lyra during the finale.
Similarhoop
- 2A bowed string instrument used in the folk music of Crete, Greece.
The lyra's three strings give Cretan dance music its distinctive sound.
At the festival, a single lyra accompanied the singers through the night.
Note
This living folk instrument is often called the Cretan lyra and described as the surviving heir of the Byzantine instrument. It is pear-shaped and usually handmade. At weddings it is heard alongside the lute, or laouto. In English the plural is simply lyras, as in the piriform lyras of Crete.
- 3A bowed string instrument played in the Byzantine Empire.
Travelers from Constantinople carried the lyra to the courts of neighboring lands.
The lyra's bowed strings filled the cathedral during imperial ceremonies.
Note
The word comes from Greek lyra and is a doublet of lyre and lira. Even so, this instrument is played with a bow. Historians of music give it a central place in the family tree. One account traces it from the Arabic rebab, through the Byzantine lyra of the ninth century, to the European rebec. Writers often describe it as an ancestor of most European bowed instruments.
Less common meaning
- 4The central region of the fornix's ventral, or lower, surface in the brain.
The anatomist labeled the lyra on the underside of the fornix.
The vessels of the brain generally are often distended and gorged with blood, the lyra especially being fully injected.
1840, Alexander Tweedie, William Wood GerhardNote
An old anatomical name, now dated, that Alexander Tweedie and William Wood Gerhard could still use in A System of Practical Medicine (1840) to describe the lyra as gorged with blood. Lyra is the Greek and Latin name for the lyre. This part of the brain was named for the arrangement of the lines that mark it. Modern anatomical writing rarely uses the name.
Practice
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Origins
The name comes from the arrangement of the lines with which it is marked in the human brain.
From Ancient Greek λῠ́ρᾱ (lŭ́rā) or Modern Greek λύρα (lýra); it is a doublet of lira, Lyra, and lyre.