Tiresias is a person in old Greek stories — a prophet, which means someone who can see what will happen later. He is blind. He cannot see the room in front of him, but he can see the future, and the Greeks liked that idea very much: the man who sees least sees most. He appears in the play about King Oedipus. The king is looking for the man who killed the old king, and Tiresias knows the answer: it is Oedipus himself. He does not want to say it. The king shouts at him and calls him useless, and only then does he speak. That scene is the reason most students meet the name at all. In stories he lived a very long time, and in some versions he lived part of his life as a woman and part as a man, so he was asked to settle arguments between the gods. Today the name is used mostly in books, essays and literature classes, not in daily talk. If an English writer calls someone "a Tiresias", they mean a person who knows the painful truth, says it, and is not believed. In English it is usually said "tie-REE-see-us".

泰瑞西亞斯（希臘神話中的盲眼先知）。台灣的希臘神話書多半譯成「泰瑞西亞斯」或「提瑞西阿斯」，兩種都看得到；不用強記，寫報告時附上原文 Tiresias 最保險。