Home › Glossary › Letter N

Necropolis

Life And Death
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A large ancient cemetery or “city of the dead.” It can symbolize collective memory, empire, and the permanence of burial.

Detailed Definition
Necropolis literally means “city of the dead” and refers to a large burial ground, often associated with ancient civilizations. In poetry, it can transform a cemetery into a parallel metropolis whose streets, monuments, and names preserve a vanished population. The term lends grandeur and historical depth to meditations on death, while also inviting questions about whose deaths are memorialized, whose are forgotten, and how power survives in stone.
Example
Example in poetry:
A necropolis is a city of the dead, so a poem may describe tombs, roads, gates, and districts as though the cemetery were an actual city; Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" can inform necropolis imagery by showing ruins as evidence of mortality and fallen power; A poet walking through a necropolis might compare engraved names to street signs in a silent metropolis; The necropolis can symbolize collective memory, where generations of private lives form a public landscape
Additional Notes
Necropolis literally means “city of the dead.” Unlike a single tomb, it emphasizes scale and collective burial, making it useful in poems about archaeology, empire, urban history, war, and long cultural memory.
Also Known As
City of the Dead Cemetery
Skip to main content