1. epigraph - Noun
2. epigraph - Verb
Any inscription set upon a building; especially, one which has to do with the building itself, its founding or dedication.
A citation from some author, or a sentence framed for the purpose, placed at the beginning of a work or of its separate divisions; a motto.
Source: Webster's dictionaryConrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph. Joseph Conrad
I think Ushant describes it pretty well, with that epigraph from Tom Brown's School Days: "I'm the poet of White Horse Vale, sir, with Liberal notions under my cap!” For some reason those lines stuck in my head, and I've never forgotten them. This image became something I had to be. Conrad Aiken
A convex function is a real-valued function defined on an interval with the property that its epigraph (the set of points on or above the graph of the function) is a convex set. Source: Internet
A bleak epigraph marks the start of the book’s final section: “No one remembers you at all.” Source: Internet
Ever the lover of the self-protective paradox, Akhtar quotes Alison Bechdel in his epigraph: “I can only make things up about things that have already happened.” Source: Internet
The presence of the Apostle Peter in this area, where he is supposed to have lived, appears to be confirmed in an epigraph in the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian that reads Domus Petri (English House of Peter). Source: Internet