The corpus record — Latin

babae

babae · interj

odds bodkins! wonderful! strange!

Generated live from the audited Latin corpus — every figure on this page is a database query, not prose from memory.

Where it lives

Apocolocyntosis 1 · 3.69/10k
Stichus 1 · 1.61/10k
Casina 1 · 1.29/10k
Persa 1 · 1.27/10k
Pseudolus 1 · 0.9/10k
Satyricon 2 · 0.66/10k
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales 1 · 0.08/10k

What it meant — Lewis & Short

băbae or păpae, interj., = babai/ or papai/, an exclamation of wonder and joy,

I odds bodkins! wonderful! strange!

I Form babae: huic babae! basilice te intulisti et facete, Plaut. Pers. 5, 2, 25; so id. Ps. 1, 3, 131; id. Cas. 5, 2, 26; id. Ep. 1, 1, 52; v. under II.; Petr. 37, 9.—

II Form papae: Ep. Cadum tibi veteris vini propino. St. Papae! Plaut. Stich. 3, 1, 24; 5, 7, 3; id. Rud. 5, 2, 33; id. Bacch. 2, 2, 29; id. Men. 5, 5, 20; Ter Eun. 2, 1, 23; 2, 2, 48; 3, 1, 26.

In the wild

Babae Plautus, Stichus 5.7
Babae Plautus, Pseudolus 1.3
Babae Plautus, Casina 5.2
babae Petronius, Satyricon 37
Babae Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales 2.15.9
babae Plautus, Persa 5.2

6 of 8 attestations shown.

Where it came from

Walde-Hofmann, Lateinisches etymologisches Worterbuch Treated in Walde-Hofmann, Lateinisches etymologisches Worterbuch s.v. babae (scan pp. 122-123; entry #334). Root candidates: *bamb-.

Latin text and lemmatization derived from the Perseus Digital Library (canonical-latinLit), CC BY-SA 4.0. Lewis & Short (public domain) via Perseus. This derived data is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license.