anthology [E17th] An anthology is literally a collection of flowers. The Greek word anthologia (from anthos ‘flower’, source also of the botanical anther [L18th]) and logia ‘collection’ was applied to a collection of the ‘flowers’ of verse, poems by various authors that had been chosen as being especially fine. Writing in 1580, the French essayist Montaigne uses the same metaphor: ‘It could be said of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other men’s flowers, providing of my own only the string that ties them together.’