| A | B |
|---|
| Achilles heel | a Greek hero in the Trojan War |
| Aeolian | The Greek god of the wind who gave Odysseus a bag of winds to help him return to Ithaca |
| Apollo | The god of prophecy, music, medicine, and poetry, sometimes identified with the sun; twin brother of Artemis |
| Aurora | Personification of the dawn in classical mythology |
| Brobdingnagian | After a country in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, where everything was enormous |
| Casanova | an 18th-century Italian adventurer who wrote vivid accounts of his sexual encounters |
| Chauvinist | legendary French soldier famous for his devotion to Napoleon |
| Daedalus | an Athenian architect who built the labyrinth for Minos and made wings for himself and his son to escape from Crete. |
| Don Juan | legendary Spanish seducer of women |
| Don Quixote | The titular hero of a novel by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes |
| El Dorado | a legendary place in South America where the streets were said to be paved with gold and wealth and riches were to be had in abundance |
| Eye of the Needle | A narrow gate through which camels had to crawl on all fours |
| Falstaffian | After a character in Henry IV, Parts I and II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare |
| Frankenstein | Titular figure in gothic novel by Mary Shelley |
| Galahad | the purest knight of the Round Table in Arthurian legend, who succeeded in his quest for the Holy Grail |
| Good Samaritan | Biblical parable about a person who rescues and cares for a stranger who had been robbed and badly hurt and had been ignored by others |
| Hector | The main Trojan hero in the Trojan War and the son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba; killed by Achilles |
| Helen | The beautiful daughter of Zeus and Leda who was abducted by Paris; the Greek army sailed to Troy to get her back which resulted in the Trojan War |
| Hercules | Greek/Roman hero, son of Zeus and Alcmene; killed his wife and children in a fit of madness and was ordered to perform a series of monumental labors as penance |
| Holy Grail | A cup or plate that, according to medieval legend, was used by Jesus at the Last Supper and that later became the object of many chivalrous quests |
| Hydra-headed | A many-headed monster that was slain by Hercules. |
| Icarus | a son who ignored his fathers advice |
| Jekyll and Hyde | Titular reference to novel by Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Job | a righteous man whose faith withstood severe testing by God |
| Jonah | a Minor Prophet who, for his impiety, was thrown overboard from his ship and swallowed by a large fish, remaining in its belly for three days before being cast up onto the shore unharmed. |
| Judas | one of Jesus Christs disciples who betrayed him by identifying him with a kiss to the Jewish leaders in exchange for thirty pieces of silver |
| Lethe | a river believed to cause forgetfulness |
| Lilliputian | After a country in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, where everything was miniaturized |
| Machiavellian | Italian political theorist whose book The Prince (1513) describes the achievement and maintenance of power by a determined ruler indifferent to moral considerations. |
| Malapropism | After a character in The Rivals, a comic farce by Restoration playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan |
| Manna | food provided miraculously to feed the Israelites in the wilderness |
| Mentor | The friend whom Odysseus left in charge of the household while he was at Troy and who was the teacher and protector of Telemachus, Odysseus son |
| Mercury | messenger god |
| Muse | One of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, who inspired and presided over the different creative arts. |
| Nemesis | the goddess of divine retribution |
| Nirvana | In Buddhism and Hinduism, the state of enlightenment that transcends the cycle of reincarnation |
| Nostradamus | French physician and astrologer who wrote Centuries (1555), a book of prophecies. |
| Oedipus | Hero of a tragedy by Sophocles; the son of Laius and Jocasta, who was abandoned at birth and unwittingly killed his father and then married his mother. |
| Original Sin | the disobedience of Adam and Eve |
| Pandoras box | The story of how evil and ill will came into the world |
| Philistine | people of coastal Palestine, who made war on the Israelites |
| Phoenix | A bird in Egyptian mythology that lived in the desert for 500 years and then consumed itself by fire, later to rise renewed from its ashes. |
| Pollyanna | titular heroine of a 1913 novel and later movie in which a young girl is adopted by her very wealthy aunt; upon the girls arrival, the dispirited town in which her aunt lives becomes miraculously pleasant and healthy due to the gladness the child has brought. |
| Prodigal Son | Biblical parable of a son granted a warm homecoming despite having squandered his inheritance |
| Proteus | sea god who could change his shape at will |
| Pyrrhus | Greek king who suffered heavy losses in defeating the Romans in 279 B.C., |
| Samson | In the Bible, an Israelite judge and warrior who used his enormous strength to fight the Philistines, to whom he was ultimately betrayed by his mistress, Delilah, who cut the lock of hair which was the source of his strength |
| Siren song | One of a group of sea nymphs who lured mariners to destruction on the rocks surrounding their island |
| Spartan | Natives of an ancient Greek city noted for their toughness in enduring pain and hardship |
| Sword of Damocles | hung by a hair over a would-be rulers head to teach him a moral lesson |
| Tantalize | a king who was condemned to stand in water under a fruit tree. Whenever he tried to drink or eat, the water or fruit receded beyond his reach. |
| Waterloo | A town of central Belgium near Brussels where Napoleon fell to the British |
