Gymnopaedia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An ancient Spartan festival of song and dance performed by unclothed boys ; a set of slow piano pieces composed by Erik Satie in the 1880s
2. A traditional Spartan celebration featuring nude youths dancing and singing ; a group of languid piano works written by the French composer Erik Satie
3. An annual festival in Sparta where naked young men danced and sang in honor of Apollo ; slow, dreamy piano compositions by Erik Satie

Etymology: Gymnopaedia was a festival held in Sparta each summer, in which boys and young men performed naked dances and songs in honour of Apollo and Artemis. The name comes from Ancient Greek "gumnopaidiai", the plural of a noun built from "gumnos", meaning "naked", and "paideia", meaning "youth" or "education," a word that in classical Greek also carried the sense of the training a young person received. The English word is a direct borrowing of the Greek plural, so it keeps the "-ai" ending that marks plurals in Greek. Writers in English use it for the festival itself and for the dance performed there, and the ending sometimes leads readers to treat it as a singular, which is the Greek form's quirk rather than an error on the reader's part.