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The corpus record — Latin

basium

basium

kiss

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

Where it lives

What it meant

1. basium — de Vaan

basium 'kiss' [n. o] (Cat+) Derivatives: basiare 'to kiss' (Cat.+). The recent date of attestation renders a loanword likely. Since Catullus, who introduced the word into the written language, was from Verona, it might have been Celtic, The original meaning of basium included an erotic connotation absent from osculum; in Imperial Latin, basium became the general word for 'kiss'. Many IE and non-IE languages contain … — [de Vaan, s.v. basium, p. 83]

2. bāsĭum — Lewis & Short

bāsĭum, ii, n.for sāvĭum, suavium; cf. Engl. buss; O. Germ. bus,

I a kiss.
I In gen. (rare and mostly poet.; most freq. in Cat.; not in Plaut. or Ter.): da mi basia mille, Cat. 5, 7; 5, 13; 7, 9; 16, 12; 99, 16; Mart. 2, 21, 1; 11, 98, 9; 12, 55, 9; 12, 59, 1; Petr. 21, 2, 110: impingere alicui, id. 21, 2, 31.—
II Esp., a kissing of the hand: jactat basia tibicen, throws kisses of the hand, Phaedr. 5, 8, 28; so Juv. 4, 117.

In the wild

6 of 41 attestations shown.

Where it came from

  • de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) Treated in de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) s.v. basium (scan p. 83; entry #142).
  • Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine Treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine s.v. basium (scan p. 91; entry #1198).

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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.