A form of divination or fortune-telling performed by observing or interpreting patterns in scattered grain, barley, or wheat.
From Greek krithi (barley) + manteia (divination). Constructed in the 19th-20th centuries as a scholarly term for an ancient practice similar to alectomancy or other forms of augury.
Crithomancy connects to agricultural divination practices found across cultures—farmers reading signs in their crops—which later influenced how people understood randomness and probability in mathematics.
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