[…] Mr. Cruickshank saw a Monster nine Months old, which lived thirty-six Hours after it was born, though it had no Cranium: […] But is this a Reason that we should believe the vital Functions and the Increase of the Body have no dependence on the Brain? I think not: for such acephalous Subjects never live long […]

“But tell me, my Dea—my Psyche!—
(With your wings outspread as to race
With that swift and acephalous Nike
Who lost her bean somewhere in Thrace)

[…] an Oecumenical Council is a whole, and a Body whereof the Pope, or he that presides in it in his place, is the Head[.] For there is no Acephalous Council, as M. Schelstrate speaks, that is to say, without a Head, calling that of Constance so in the Absence of the Pope.

A very brief acephalous interim followed the death of the dark Dictator.

They have acephalous or headless Verses, which commence with a short Syllable instead of a long one:

Sometimes verse lines “jump” the first syllable (in anapaestic and dactylic measures the first two syllables) of a regular metre. Such lines are said to be acephalous (headless) or, as acrostic writers would put it, “beheaded.”

1828, Thomas de Quincey, review of Elements of Rhetoric by Richard Whately, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 24, No. 147, December 1828, p. 905,
Men wrote eloquently, because they wrote feelingly: they wrote idiomatically, because they wrote naturally, and without affectation: but if a false or acephalous structure of sentence,—if a barbarous idiom—or an exotic word happened to present itself, no writer of the 17th century seems to have had any such scrupulous sense of the dignity belonging to his own language, as should make it a duty to reject it, or worth his while to re-model a line.

Acephalous

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