The corpus record — Latin

băsănītes lăpis

a touchstone

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

What it meant

băsănītes lăpis — Lewis & Short

băsănītes lăpis = basaniths (ba/sanos),

I a touchstone, test-stone, a very hard stone, used as a test for the precious metals, for whetstones, and, in medicine, for mortars, Plin. 36, 20, 38, § 147; 36, 22, 43, § 157; Isid. Orig. 16, 4, 36.—Also basanites alone, Plin. 36, 7, 11, § 58.

Where it came from

No etymology authority pointer is recorded for this lemma yet — an honest gap, not an omission.

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.