Definition of "acephalous" in English

adjective

1. Having no head.

2. (zoology, applied to bivalve mollusks) Without a distinct head.

3. (botany) Having the style spring from the base, instead of from the apex, as is the case in certain ovaries

4. (social sciences, political science, sociology) A system of society without centralised state authority, where power is welded amongst groups of community entities e.g. clans. Without a leader or chief.

   • an acephalous society / community

5. (prosody) Deficient in the beginning, as a line of poetry that is missing its expected opening syllable.

6. Lacking the first portion of the text. (of a manuscript)

7. (rare) Without a beginning.

   • 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.