Ulysses

American  

[yoo-lis-eez] / yuˈlɪs iz /

noun

1. Classical Mythology. Latin name for Odysseus.

2. (italics) a psychological novel (1922) by James Joyce.

3. a male given name.

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Ulysses British  

/ ˈjuːlɪˌsiːz, juːˈlɪsiːz /

noun

1. the Latin name of Odysseus

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Ulysses Cultural  

1. The Roman name of the Greek hero Odysseus.

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The Irish author James Joyce adopted the name for the title of his masterpiece of the early twentieth century, which is, in part, a retelling of the myth of Odysseus.

In the Aeneid of Virgil, which was written in Latin, Odysseus is called Ulysses.

Example Sentences

As workers cleaned his Toyota Camry, a retired history professor waited on a bench, reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 23, 2025

The Ulysses mission, launched in 1990, was the first spacecraft to leave the ecliptic plane and sample the solar wind over the poles.

From Science Daily • Oct. 14, 2025

The plan fell apart after President Ulysses S. Grant got wind of it, triggering the Panic of 1869, with the gold market crashing and stock prices plummeting.

From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 2, 2025

James Joyce’s "Ulysses" rained em dashes on winding sentences that he had already stripped of quotation marks, resulting in prose so unruly that numerous reading groups are devoted specifically to parsing it.

From Salon • Jun. 11, 2025

He hoped to get conclusive answers from Admiral Ulysses Sharp, commander of the Pacific fleet, who was monitoring the situation from his base in Hawaii.

From "Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War" by Steve Sheinkin