# proleptic
## English
### Etymology

From prolepsis (“anticipation”) +‎ -ic.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /pɹoʊˈlɛptɪk/
* Audio (Southern England):(file)

### Adjective

proleptic (comparative more proleptic, superlative most proleptic)
* (of a calendar) Extrapolated to dates prior to its first adoption; of those used to adjust to or from the Julian calendar or Gregorian calendar.
** 1999, Kenneth R. Lang, Astrophysical Formulae: Space, Time, Matter and Cosmology, volume II, Springer, →ISBN, page 70:The Julian proleptic calendar is formed by applying the rules of the Julian calendar to times before Caesar's reform, and the Julian date (JD) specifies the particular instant of a day by ending the Julian day number with the fraction of the day elapsed since the preceding Greenwich noon.
** 2018, Ian Chivers, Jane Sleightholme, Introduction to Programming with Fortran, Springer, →ISBN, page 535:The proleptic Gregorian calendar is produced by extending the Gregorian calendar backwards to dates preceding its official introduction in 1582.
** 2022, Tomasz Lelek, Jon Skeet, Software Mistakes and Tradeoffs: How to Make Good Programming Decisions, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 155:The .NET epoch is midnight at the start of January 1st, AD 1, although that's AD 1 in a proleptic Gregorian calendar, which refers to even more complexity we haven't talked about yet.
* Anticipatory; prescient or forward-looking.
** 1844, Thomas De Quincey, “Greece Under the Romans”, in Blackwood's Magazine:A far-seeing or proleptic wisdom.
** 1892, Emmanuel Pétavel-Olliff, The Problem of Immortality, page 208:In contrast with physical death, spiritual death might be called metaphorical. It becomes proleptic when contrasted with the second and final death.
** 1985 June, Anthony Burgess, “The Prisoner of Fame”, in The Atlantic‎:Herbert Gorman’s life of Joyce was written not only when Finnegans Wake was a long way from completion but with the handicap of the subject himself insisting on a hagiography featuring a prolonged, if proleptic, martyrdom.
** 1989, W. Paul Jones, Theological Worlds, Nashville: Abingdon Press, page 151:In World Two, Jesus can be seen as the proleptic event, giving promise of God's vindication of creation in and through history.
** 1995, John S. Murphy, Frederic M. Hudson, The Joy of Old: A Guide to Successful Elderhood, page 41:In a world of youth idolatry, we easily lose our proleptic quality after the first peak, and become regressive, looking back toward the peaks already passed.
** 2020, Randal Joy Thompson, Proleptic Leadership on the Commons:Viewing the commons as a vehicle for a new world order, Randal Joy Thompson proposes ‘proleptic leadership’, which envisions how leaders will continue to be essential as the custodians of responsible agency and conscious choice.
* Exhibiting or pertaining to prolepsis (any sense)
** 1904, Aeschylus, Arthur Woollgar Verrall, The 'Agamemnon' of Aeschylus, page 90:a 'proleptic' epithet describing the result of the hunt, means literally 'with leafage broken' and is formed from the stem of ἀγνύναι.
** 1985, W. Randall Garr, Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E, page 168:There was no proleptic suffix in Moabite, according to the present evidence.
** 2005, Jaime Esteban Salvo, The Effect of Nitrogen and Plant Growth Regulators on Sylleptic and Proleptic Shoot Development of 'Hass' Avocado (Persea Americana Mill.), page 104:Starting in the spring of the second year, one terminal indeterminate floral shoot ( I ) was included at every terminal proleptic shoot ( L ) that arose from each proleptic and sylleptic shoot in the summer and full flush of the previous year.
** 2015 September 8, Alex Preston, “Submission by Michel Houellebecq review – satire that’s more subtle than it seems”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:Submission, as is fitting for a dystopia written in the mode of the “not yet”, ends in a proleptic future tense, speaking of what will come for François and (with rather less authorial interest) for the people of France.
** 2017 August 26, Bret Stephens, “Tips for Aspiring Op-Ed Writers”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:8) Be proleptic, a word that comes from the Greek for “anticipation.” That is, get the better of the major objection to your argument by raising and answering it in advance.

#### Related terms

* prolepsis
* proleptical
* proleptically

#### See also

* procataleptic

### Noun

proleptic (plural proleptics)
* An instance of prolepsis;
** The placement of an element in a syntactic unit before that to which it would logically correspond.
** Information about the outcome of a story placed near the beginning.
** A lateral branch that develops from a lateral meristem, after the formation of a bud or following a period of dormancy, when the lateral meristem is split from a terminal meristem.
* Something that predicts or implies the future or outcome.