{"id":18203,"date":"2020-04-02T21:38:08","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T04:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18203"},"modified":"2020-03-31T21:39:50","modified_gmt":"2020-04-01T04:39:50","slug":"frontispiece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2020\/04\/02\/frontispiece\/","title":{"rendered":"frontispiece"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>According to Wikipedia:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>The word [<i><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Book_frontispiece\">frontispiece<\/a><\/i>] comes from the French <i>frontispice<\/i>, which derives from the late Latin <i>frontispicium<\/i>, composed of the Latin <i>frons<\/i> (\u2018forehead\u2019) and <i>specere<\/i> (\u2018to look at\u2019). [\u2026] In English, it was originally used as an architectural term, referring to the decorative facade of a building. In the 17th century, in other languages [\u2026], the term came to refer to the title page of a book, which at the time was often decorated with intricate engravings that borrowed stylistic elements from architecture, such as columns and pediments. Over the course of the 17th century, the title page of a book came to be accompanied by an illustration on the facing page [\u2026], so that in English the term took on the meaning it retains today as early as 1682. By then, the English spelling had also morphed, by way of folk etymology, from \u2018frontispice\u2019 to \u2018frontispiece\u2019[\u2026]<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>World Wide Words has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwidewords.org\/weirdwords\/ww-fro1.htm\">more about the history of <i>frontispiece<\/i><\/a>, and it elaborates on a line referring to divination that I elided from the abovequoted Wikipedia piece. WWW says:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>You might think that [<i>frontispicium<\/i>] referred to the forehead being a clearly visible part of a person\u2019s head, but it seems instead to have been connected with [a Classical divination method that\u2019s also known as] <i>metoposcopy<\/i> [\u2026]; it\u2019s the art of telling people\u2019s character or fortune from their foreheads[\u2026]. The association of ideas seems to be that the fa\u00e7ade of a building is as expressive as a person\u2019s forehead.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18203"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18209,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18203\/revisions\/18209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}