What does the word Enneagram mean?

Breaking the word apart

ennea

Greek for nine, as in ennead, a group of nine

gramma

Greek for a letter, mark, or drawing, as in diagram and telegram

Literal sense

A nine-figure, or a nine-pointed drawing

Part of speech

A common noun, written enneagram or Enneagram

The same "gram" ending shows up in words you already know. A pentagram is a five-pointed star. A hexagram is a six-pointed one. A diagram is something drawn through or across. Enneagram follows the same pattern for nine.

What the figure looks like

Draw a circle and place nine evenly spaced points on it, numbered clockwise with 9 at the top. Connect 3, 6 and 9 to make a triangle. Then connect the remaining points in the order 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7, and back to 1. That six-sided path is not random: it follows the repeating digits of one divided by seven, 0.142857. Sevenths and the triangle together give the figure its distinctive shape.

From figure to personality system

For several decades the word referred to the diagram alone, used by the teacher G. I. Gurdjieff to illustrate ideas about processes and change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Oscar Ichazo and later Claudio Naranjo placed personality patterns on each of the nine points. People began to call that system "the Enneagram of personality," and eventually just "the Enneagram." Today most people who use the word mean the personality types, not the geometry.

Words built on the same root

Enneagram culture has generated its own vocabulary, most of it built from the type numbers rather than Greek. You will see "enneatype" for a person's type, "enneagrammer" for an enthusiast, and phrases like "a 4w5" for a type and wing. None of these are standard dictionary words, and different communities use them differently.

Capital letter or not?

Both forms are correct. Dictionaries list the lowercase form as primary for the figure, while writers about personality usually capitalize it when they mean the system. On EnneaFox we capitalize it throughout, since we are almost always talking about the personality model.

Other nine-part words

Ennea also appears in a handful of rare English words. An enneagon, also called a nonagon, is a nine-sided polygon. An ennead is a set of nine, used for example for a group of nine gods in ancient Egyptian religion or for each group of nine treatises into which a student arranged the writings of the philosopher Plotinus. Oscar Ichazo originally used "enneagon" for his version of the figure before "enneagram" became the standard term. None of these words carries any meaning about personality; they are all just counting to nine.

Using the word in a sentence

A few common patterns: "I am reading about the Enneagram," meaning the personality system; "she drew an enneagram on the whiteboard," meaning the figure; "my Enneagram type is 6," meaning a person's place in the system. All three are standard, and context nearly always makes the meaning clear.