A chrestomathy ( ; from the Ancient Greek 'desire of learning', from 'useful' + 'learn') is a collection of selected literary passages (usually from a single author); a selection of literary passages from a foreign language assembled for studying the language; or a text in various languages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject. In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader that presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or literary style. It is different from an anthology because of its didactic purpose.

Examples

• Bernhard Dorn, A Chrestomathy of the Pushtū or Afghan language, St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1847

• H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of his Choicest Writing, New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1949

• L. L. Zamenhof, , Paris: Hachette, 1903

• Edward Ullendorff, A Tigrinya Chrestomathy, Stuttgart: Steiner Werlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.

• Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar, by Georgios Dimitriou, 1785, that contained personal observations, Epistles and Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men.

• Rosetta Code, "a programming chrestomathy site", which "present[s] solutions to the same task in as many different [computer] languages as possible".

• The Ibis Chrestomathy, dealing "solely with words that have a claim to naturalization within the English language".

• Heather Christle, The Crying Book, Catapult: 2019. Explores the subject of crying and tears in a numbered series of extremely short essays.

See also

• Parallel text

• Text corpus

References