epitaph

noun

1. An inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.

   “The church itself, or at all events the squat and tiny tower, has not altered much since Lamb saw it. But the epitaphs have gone. Search among the ivies and yews of the shady little churchyard will discover a number of flat, weatherworn slabs of stone, but the verses and the signatures have vanished.”

   “Ayot St Lawrence's most famous inhabitant, George Bernard Shaw, moved into the New Rectory in 1906 because, it is said, of a gravestone epitaph in the churchyard. This recorded the death of a woman who lived to be 70 with the comment 'Her time was short'. Shaw thought that a place that considered a life of 70 years short was the right place for him.”

2. A poem or other short text written in memory of a deceased person.

   “Nam vinci in amore turpissimum putant, not only living, but when their friends are dead, with tombs and monuments, nenias, epitaphs, elegies, inscriptions, pyramids, obelisks, statues, images, pictures, histories, poems, annals, feasts, anniversaries, many ages after (as Plato's scholars did) they will parentare still, omit no good office that may tend to the preservation of their names, honours, and eternal memory.”

verb

1. (intransitive)To write or speak after the manner of an epitaph.

   “The Commons in their speeches epitaph upon him […] "He lived as a wolf and died as a dog."”

2. (transitive)To commemorate by an epitaph.

   “Let me rather be epitaphed the inventor of the English Hexameter.”