The corpus record — Latin

chaos

The boundless

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

Where it lives

Ephemeris id est totius diei negotium 1 · 7.71/10k
Hercules 4 · 5.26/10k
de raptu Proserpinae 3 · 4.3/10k
Cathemerina 3 · 4.08/10k
Hercules Oetaeus 4 · 3.55/10k
Medea 2 · 3.53/10k
Thyestes 2 · 3.18/10k
de bello Gildonico 1 · 3.16/10k
Hamartigenia 2 · 3.13/10k
Apotheosis 2 · 2.7/10k
Ibis 1 · 2.54/10k
Contra Symmachum 3 · 2.5/10k

Densest 12 of 36 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

Chăŏs — Lewis & Short

Chăŏs or Chăus,

abl. Chao (other cases not used in the class. per.;

I gen. Chaï, Serv. ad Verg. A. 1, 664; dat. Chaï, Prisc. p. 720 P.), n., = *xa/os.

I The boundless, empty space; as the kingdom of darkness, the Lower World: ingens, Ov. M. 10, 30; 14, 404; id. Ib. 84: inane, id. F. 4, 600: caecum, Sen. Med. 741; Stat. Th. 12, 772; Val. Fl. 7, 402; impersonated, masc., god of the Lower World, father of Erebos and Nox, Verg. A. 4, 510 (acc. Chaos); 6, 265; Quint. 3, 7, 8; cf.: Janus... edidit hos sonos; me Chaos antiqui, nam sum res prisca, vocabant, Ov. F. 1, 103.—

B Hence also, immeasurable darkness, deep obscurity: Cimmerium, Stat. S. 3, 2, 92: horridum, Prud. Cath. 5, 3.—

II The confused, formless, primitive mass out of which the universe was made, chaos, Ov. M. 1, 7; 2, 299; Lact. 1, 5, 8; 2, 8, 8: a Chao, since the creation of the world, Verg. G. 4, 347.

Where it came from

Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine Treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine s.v. chaos (scan pp. 141-142; entry #2098).

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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.