IHS vs. IHSV

Question

What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?

Posters should say where they live, and for which
area they are asking questions. I have lived in
Western Pa. 10 years
Indianapolis 10 years
Chicago 6 years
Brooklyn, NY 12 years
Baltimore 26 years

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?[/nq]
Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation for "in hoc signo". It is an abbreviation for "Iesus Hominem Salvator" ("Jesus, Savior of Mankind"), and is commonly found embroidered on altar cloths and engraved on headstones.
IHSV ("in hoc signo vinces") ("by this sign you will conquer") can be found on heraldic emblems and has nothing at all to do with IHS . . .

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?[/nq]
[nq:1]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation for "in hoc signo". It is an abbreviation for "Iesus ... will conquer") can be found on heraldic emblems and has nothing at all to do with IHS . . .[/nq]
Wow. It pays to ask. I've actually never seen the second one in initial form, maybe, now that I think about it. I think I learned it, in non-initial form, in Latin class, but maybe not.

I always start with an open-ended question, but now I realize none of my follow-up questions are applicable.

Posters should say where they live, and for which
area they are asking questions. I have lived in
Western Pa. 10 years
Indianapolis 10 years
Chicago 6 years
Brooklyn, NY 12 years
Baltimore 26 years

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?[/nq]
[nq:1]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation for "in hoc signo". It is an abbreviation for "Iesus Hominem Salvator" ("Jesus, Savior of Mankind"), and is commonly found embroidered on altar cloths and engraved on headstones.[/nq]
Typo there. Should be "Hominum", "of men".
[nq:1]IHSV ("in hoc signo vinces") ("by this sign you will conquer") can be found on heraldic emblems and has nothing at all to do with IHS . . .[/nq]
True, but it's probably not a coincidence that the letters IHS and the first three letters of IHSV, taking "S" for sigma, are the first three letters of IHSOUS, Jesus in Greek.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?[/nq]
[nq:1]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation for "in hoc signo". It is an abbreviation for "Iesus Hominem Salvator" ("Jesus, Savior of Mankind"), and is commonly found embroidered on altar cloths and engraved on headstones.[/nq]
Well I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me but I feel intellectually? obliged to report that I looked this up** and got a hit in wikipedia where it seem to say iiuc that this is what they call a backronym. An interpretation that arose later***. They say it is really the Latinized version of the first three Greek letters of Jesus's name, Iota, eta, sigma. The sigma got changed to an S which is fine, but the eta got changed to an H, because that's what it looks like, iiuc, and that is the origin of IHS, according to the hidden gnomes of wikipedia.
Another page
http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg id=006PZM says what you say, but a comment on that disagrees. It also suggests that the S in IHS represents not the first s but the last letter in Jesus's name.** and again noted a strange aspect of google, which is certainly relevant on english usage newsgroups, where counting the number of hits is a fairly common practice to show how common usage is. I entered Iesus Hominem Salvator and got about 5300 hits and what turns out to be the strange question, "Do you mean Iesus Hominum Salvator?" So eventually I clicked on that, and got about 5260 hits, almost the same number, but all of them this time seemed to be spelled that way.

I went back to the first search and many of the hits were also spelled hominum. In fact I had to scroll down 3 or 4 pages to find one that spelled it with an e. My point is not that hominum is the correct spelling I don't know but that the number of hits included both spellings, at least in the case of hominem.

Maybe at first google search only looked for exact matches, but now it lists both that and common non-matches (according to rules I still don't know), so one can't really rely on a google count to determine how common usage is anymore. There were problems doing this before, of course, but now they seem overwhelming. Am I right? Is there something I've left out?
Hmmm. I didn't put the three words in double quotes. Dang. Okay, in quotes, the three words with hominem got 20 hits. With u it got 1240 hits. I usually don't include quotes. I still think finding alternate spellings is less than 10 years old.
[nq:1]IHSV ("in hoc signo vinces") ("by this sign you will conquer") can be found on heraldic emblems and has nothing at all to do with IHS . . .[/nq]
Wow. It pays to ask. I've actually never seen the second one in initial form, maybe, now that I think about it. I think I learned it, in non-initial form, in Latin class, but maybe not.

I always start with an open-ended question, but now I realize none of my follow-up questions are applicable.

Posters should say where they live, and for which
area they are asking questions. I have lived in
Western Pa. 10 years
Indianapolis 10 years
Chicago 6 years
Brooklyn, NY 12 years
Baltimore 26 years

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?[/nq]
[nq:1]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation for "in hoc signo". It is an abbreviation for "Iesus ... will conquer") can be found on heraldic emblems and has nothing at all to do with IHS . . .[/nq]
BTW, it would have taken me far longer to check this out when I still though IHS was short of IHSV. Thanks a lot.

Posters should say where they live, and for which
area they are asking questions. I have lived in
Western Pa. 10 years
Indianapolis 10 years
Chicago 6 years
Brooklyn, NY 12 years
Baltimore 26 years

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation ... commonly found embroidered on altar cloths and engraved on headstones.[/nq]
[nq:1]Well I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me but I feel intellectually? obliged to report that I looked this ... that's what it looks like, iiuc, and that is the origin of IHS, according to the hidden gnomes of wikipedia.[/nq]
I hadn't known that thanks for having taken it a step further . . .

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]What is the difference between IHS and IHSV, In hoc signo and In hoc signo vinces ?[/nq]
IHS is usually interpeted to mean Iesus Hominem Salvator (or soemthing like that) Jesus, Saviour of Men (male and female).

Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation ... commonly found embroidered on altar cloths and engraved on headstones.[/nq]
[nq:1]Well I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me but I feel intellectually? obliged to report that I looked this ... that's what it looks like, iiuc, and that is the origin of IHS, according to the hidden gnomes of wikipedia.[/nq]
That's quite possible.
The bread used for communion in Orthodox Churches is stamped with

IC>XC

NI>KA
Which stands for "Jesus Christ conquers"
In western churches you will sometimes see the letters INRI on a cross, and in eastern churches INBI, the former being Latin and the latter Greek for "Jesus Christ, King of the Jews", the inscription that Pilate is said to have put on the cross on which Jesus was crucified. He also wrote it in Hebrew, but that isn't often seen.
Until recently the Roman Catholic Church believed firmly that only those three languages could be used in church servicices, and it was only in the 1960s that they began using other languages.

Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1] In western churches you will sometimes see the letters INRI on a cross, and in eastern churches ... of the Jews", the inscription that Pilate is said to have put on the cross on which Jesus was crucified.[/nq]
I doubt if Pilate had come across the word "Christ", but anyway the N refers to Nazareth.

athel

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Big difference. First of all, IHS is NOT an abbreviation ... is commonly found embroidered on altar cloths andengraved on headstones.[/nq]
IHSV (In hoc signo vicis) is in legend associated with the Roman emperor Constantine, labelling a vision of a cross in the sky before a battle. Romans supposedly took such auguries or visions seriously, this message being that if Constantine adopted the new religion of Christianity he would win the battle, So he did profess the religion, won the battle, and then made Christianity the state religion of the Roman empire. (His mother years earlier became a Christian, supposedly spent years hunting for relics of the True Cross, and was later honoured as St. Monica.)

Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

IHS vs. IHSV

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