Chrestomathy is a collection of choice literary passages, used especially as an aid in learning a foreign language.

In philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 or in the study of literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, it is a type of reader or anthology

Anthology

An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...

 which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

 or literary style.

In computer programming

Computer programming

Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...

, a program chrestomathy is a collection of similar programs written in various programming languages, for the purpose of demonstrating differences in syntax, semantics and idioms for each language. This term is thought to have been first used by Eric S. Raymond

Eric S. Raymond

Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...

 in the Retrocomputing Museum web site. It is used by analogy to a linguistic chrestomathy.

Examples

• Bernhard Dorn, A Chrestomathy of the Pushtu
  Pashto language
  Pashto , known as Afghani in Persian and Pathani in Punjabi , is the native language of the indigenous Pashtun people or Afghan people who are found primarily between an area south of the Amu Darya in Afghanistan and...
  
   or Afghan language, St. Petersburg: 1847
• Mencken, H. L.
  H. L. Mencken
  Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the...
  
  , A Mencken Chrestomathy, New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1949
• Zamenhof, L. L.
  L. L. Zamenhof
  Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was the inventor of Esperanto, the most successful constructed language designed for international communication.-Cultural background:...
  
  , Fundamenta Krestomatio de la Lingvo Esperanto, Paris: Hachette, 1903
• Edward Ullendorff, A Tigrinya
  Tigrinya language
  Tigrinya , also spelled Tigrigna, Tigrnia, Tigrina, Tigriña, less commonly Tigrinian, Tigrinyan, is a Semitic language spoken by the Tigrinya people in central Eritrea , where it is one of the two main languages of Eritrea, and in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia , where it...
  
   Chrestomathy, Stuttgart: Steiner Werlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1985.
• A list of program chrestomathy efforts on Rosetta Code
  Rosetta Code
  Rosetta Code is a wiki-based programming chrestomathy website with solutions to various programming problems in many different programming languages. It was created in 2007 by Mike Mol. Rosetta Code includes 450 programming tasks, and covers 351 programming languages...
  
  
• Bilingual Greek-Latin Grammar, by Georgios Dimitriou
  Georgios Dimitriou
  Georgios Dimitriou was an 18th century Greek author and scholar.Dimitriou was born in Ottoman ruled Gjirokaster, modern southern Albania . He lived at the time when Ali Pasha was the local Ottoman ruler of Epirus...
  
  , 1785, that contained personal observations, Epistles and Maxims, as well as biographies of notable men.