E pluribus unum

E pluribus unum (/ˈiː ˈpluːrᵻbəs ˈuːnəm/; Latin: [ˈeː ˈpluːrɪbʊs ˈuːnũː])—Latin for "Out of many, one" (alternatively translated as "One out of many" or "One from many") — is a 13-letter traditional motto of the United States of America, appearing on the Great Seal along with Annuit cœptis (Latin for "He approves the undertaking") and Novus ordo seclorum (Latin for "New order of the ages"), and adopted by an Act of Congress in 1782. Never codified by law, E Pluribus Unum was considered a de facto motto of the United States until 1956 when the United States Congress passed an act (H. J. Resolution 396), adopting "In God We Trust" as the official motto.

The 13-letter motto was suggested in 1776 by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere to the committee responsible for developing the seal. At the time of the American Revolution, the exact phrase appeared prominently on the title page of every issue of a popular periodical, The Gentleman's Magazine, which collected articles from many sources into one "magazine". This in turn can be traced back to the London-based Huguenot Peter Anthony Motteux, who used the adage for his The Gentleman's Journal, or the Monthly Miscellany (1692-1694). The phrase is similar to a Latin translation of a variation of Heraclitus's 10th fragment, "The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one." A variant of the phrase was used in Moretum, a poem attributed to Virgil but with the actual author unknown, describing (on the surface at least) the making of moretum, a kind of herb and cheese spread related to modern pesto. In the poem text, color est e pluribus unus describes the blending of colors into one. St Augustine used the non-truncated variant of the phrase, ex pluribus unum, in his Confessions (e is the form of the Latin preposition ex that regularly appears before words beginning with a consonant). But it seems more likely that the phrase refers to Cicero's paraphrase of Pythagoras in his De Officiis, as part of his discussion of basic family and social bonds as the origin of societies and states: "When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (unus fiat ex pluribus), as Pythagoras wishes things to be in friendship."

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