Definition of "gnomic" []

• Marked by aphorisms; aphoristic: gnomic verse; a gnomic style. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "When reviewers and prize jurors tout a repetitive style as "the last word in gnomic control," or a jumble of unsustained metaphor as "lyrical" writing, it is obvious that they, too, are having difficulty understanding what they read."
• "But since the subsistence is one, and He Who exercises the will is one, the object of the will, [1858] that is, the gnomic will [1859], is also one, His human will evidently following His divine will, and willing that which the divine will willed it to will."
• "Here we have first religious meditations and legends of Saints, then proverbial, or as they are called "gnomic" verses, next allegorical descriptions by means of animals, and finally riddles."