What's the difference between acrostic and rebus?

Acrostic


Definition:

  • (n.) A composition, usually in verse, in which the first or the last letters of the lines, or certain other letters, taken in order, form a name, word, phrase, or motto.
  • (n.) A Hebrew poem in which the lines or stanzas begin with the letters of the alphabet in regular order (as Psalm cxix.). See Abecedarian.
  • (n.) Alt. of Acrostical

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Mr Elton's flourishing of "Augusta" is made the more repellent by Mrs Elton's mock-coy revelation that he wrote an acrostic on her name while courting her in Bath.
  • (2) With these factors in mind, health educators may set them out as an acrostic, based on the 1st letters of a slogan which could be taught to attendants: A Child Needs Personal Love With Which To Enjoy Protein.
  • (3) Top Gear's James May was once sacked by Autocar for working an acrostic (a message spelled out in the initial letters of each line) into a special supplement, which explained how editing the pull-out was a "real pain in the arse".
  • (4) Campaign strategies this time around have included an acrostic poem attacking a local Fairfax Regional paper, the Mandurah Mail, for being “Malicious Asshole Nutcases Dickheads” (it goes on, but we won’t).

Rebus


Definition:

  • (n.) A mode of expressing words and phrases by pictures of objects whose names resemble those words, or the syllables of which they are composed; enigmatical representation of words by figures; hence, a peculiar form of riddle made up of such representations.
  • (n.) A pictorial suggestion on a coat of arms of the name of the person to whom it belongs. See Canting arms, under Canting.
  • (v. t.) To mark or indicate by a rebus.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Rebus, promised the Scottish author, will be "as stubborn and anarchic as ever", and will find himself in trouble with the author's latest creation, Malcolm Fox, of Edinburgh's internal affairs unit.
  • (2) The two great Edinburgh novels - pre-Rebus, of course - are James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, whose diableries and doublings take place partly in the Old Town's back courts and, though it doesn't mention the place at all, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Neither has much in the way of urban geography or familiar landmarks.
  • (3) Open Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, plus Sun noon-6pm in July and August The Oxford Bar Photograph: Alamy When the Inspector Rebus ITV series was relaunched in 2006, with Ken Stott stepping into the scuffed brogues of John Hannah, there was a feeling they had finally got the right man to play Ian Rankin's bruised copper.
  • (4) To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences).
  • (5) Standing in Another Man's Grave, the first book to feature Rebus since he retired in 2007's Exit Music, will be out this November, Rankin said on Tuesday.
  • (6) The data showed that Group B (rebuses) required fewer trials than Group A (abstract symbols) to meet criterion for Phase II, matching symbols to stimulus pictures.
  • (7) These are the things we are throwing away.” One of the libraries due to close is Bowhill, a place that Rankin, creator of detective John Rebus, said had been his “refuge and a place of constant wonder” when he was growing up.
  • (8) In a scene that could have come from a crime novel (and Rankin has said Rebus might have acted in the same way), Fulcher questioned a suspect, Chris Halliwell, on a remote hillside without access to legal advice in a desperate attempt to crack the case.
  • (9) "There's also a lot of similarities between Taggart and Rebus – that's the nature of crime," he said.
  • (10) Some say the couple wrote the finest crime series ever; that without them we would not have Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander.
  • (11) Gargan says that he accepts Rebus creator Ian Rankin's view that a novel that actually followed police procedure would be exceedingly dull, but he worries about the impact that fictional coppers have on the real article and wishes they were depicted in a more realistic way.
  • (12) The symbol sets included: nonidentical objects, miniature objects, identical colored photographs, nonidentical colored photographs, black-and-white photographs, Picture Communication Symbols (PCS), Picsyms, Rebus, Self-Talk, Blissymbols, and written words.
  • (13) And it certainly isn't Philip Marlowe , or John Rebus , or VI Warshawski (who manages to be twice as hardboiled as her male counterparts).
  • (14) Group A (abstract symbols) required fewer trials than Group B (rebuse) to meet criterion for Phase 111, matching printed words to stimulus pictures.
  • (15) Results indicated that treatment, consisting of a sound-referenced rebus approach, affected change in production of trained words as well as generalization to untrained words for targeted behaviors.
  • (16) Crime writers should depict more detectives as clean-living and balanced rather than damaged and hard-drinking like the Inspector Rebus of Ian Rankin's novels, a chief constable has said.
  • (17) It is another mystery for inspector Rebus to solve.
  • (18) Which is why, largely to reassure fans who may or may not have read Joyce but read Rebus by the yard, poor Ian Rankin can be seen counting exactly how many steps there are on Edinburgh's Fleshmarket Close.
  • (19) The lexical hypothesis would therefore lead one to expect that rebus sentences will be relatively difficult, whereas the conceptual hypothesis would predict that rebus sentences would be rather easy.
  • (20) Ian Rankin has only yanked detective inspector John Rebus out of retirement, but fans will still be rejoicing at news that the dour investigator is set to return later this year with a new mystery to solve.