the poetry project

An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet.[1] The term comes from the French acrostiche from post-classical Latin acrostichis, from Koine Greek ἀκροστιχίς, from Ancient Greek ἄκρος "highest, topmost" and στίχος "verse".[2] As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. When the last letter of each new line (or other recurring feature) forms a word it is called a telestich (or telestic); the combination of an acrostic and a telestich in the same composition is called a double acrostic(e.g. the first-century Latin Sator Square). source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrostic