acrostic

Acrostic comes from a Greek word that refers to the completion of a verse. The first meaning of the concept mentioned in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) mentions the poem that, with the initial, intermediate or final letters of his verses, form an expression or a word.

For example:

I would give everything to see you again
even what I never had
Or that it was mine and I lost it.
Only that I ask: to see you again.

As you can see, if we take the first letter of each verse and join them, the word "God". This stanza, therefore, is an acrostic.

By extension, any term or expression that is formed from this method of composition is called acrostic. "Calm", in this sense, it can be an acrostic derived from "When someone reads, they learn a lot".

Regarding the history of this term, it is believed that the first to compose this type of works were the Provencal poets, and that later the Castilians began to incorporate them into their repertoires. With regard to the Provencal poets, it is about those writers who used the idiom Occitan, a Romance language of the European continent, for the creation of his works.

By extension, it is spoken of provencal literature or occitan to all literary works that use that language. Its origin dates back to the 11th century, and it occurred in poetry. The work carried out by the troubadours of dissemination and development of the letters promoted the rise of vulgar works in the Europe of the Middle Ages.

At certain moments in the history of literature in which the elaborate forms stood out, as was the case of the Baroque literary, the acrostic was one of the most widespread devices. Leaving aside the discomfort that it may generate in reading its not very direct or overloaded natureIt should be noted that many readers find the process of discovering one relatively hidden message within another entertaining.

There are several examples of acrostics considered famous for belonging to some of the most important works of world literature. Such is the case of Foreword from La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas when we have the information. It is built in verse and with the initials of each of its lines it is possible to put together the phrase "El bachiller". Luis Tovar and Antonio de Lofraso are other authors who made use of the acrostic in their works.

It is called acrostic, on the other hand, to a hobby It invites you to discover, following certain instructions, the words that, located in a column, allow you to form other words or an expression with their initial letters.

Although it can be said that the acrostic as a game presents certain similarities with the crossword, it is easy to distinguish them in their purest forms, since while the latter is presented as a grid in which various words written horizontally or vertically converge, the acrostic is usually made up of a list of words, all in the same sense, aligned in such a way that one of its letters serves to form the word or phrase that is also called acrostic. In both cases, the process consists of discovering each word through its definitions.

An example of an acrostic as a hobby is as follows:

Discover the name of the color by answering the following questions and joining the initial letters of each answer:

1. What animal is Mickey Mouse? Mouse.
2. What illness does someone who is overweight suffer from? Obesity.
3. What was the first name of Lennon, the musician who was part of The Beatles? John.
4. What is the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? NATO.

By joining the initials, the unknown of the acrostic is solved: RED.