The corpus record — Latin

dedecet

it is unseemly, unsuitable, unbecoming

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

Where it lives

Carmina 2 · 1.5/10k
De Scorpiace 1 · 1.26/10k
Ars Amatoria 1 · 0.67/10k
De Officiis 2 · 0.59/10k
Orator 1 · 0.54/10k
De Ira 1 · 0.45/10k
Institutio Oratoria 4 · 0.23/10k
De Beneficiis 1 · 0.22/10k
Tusculanae Disputationes 1 · 0.18/10k
De Oratore 1 · 0.17/10k
Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales 2 · 0.17/10k
Res Rustica, Books I-IX 1 · 0.13/10k

Densest 12 of 14 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

dē-dĕcet — Lewis & Short

dē-dĕcet, cuit, 2,

I v. impers. (very rarely pers., v. infra, II.), it is unseemly, unsuitable, unbecoming: decere quasi aptum esse consentaneumque tempori et personae, etc.... contraque item dedecere, Cic. Or. 22, 74.—

I Prop. (class.; usually connected with a negation), construed like decet (q. v.), with nom. or inf. rei, and with acc. pers. or absol.

(a) Neque te ministrum dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta vite bibentem, Hor. Od. 1, 38, 7: me usus precum, Ov. M. 6, 689: nihil se, id. Rem. Am. 410. In plur.: nec dominam motae dedecuere comae, Ov. Am. 1, 7, 12; 3, 15, 4.—

(b) Ut, si quid dedeceat, vitemus, Cic. Off. 1, 41: vox, Quint. 11, 3, 104.—

(a) Oratorem irasci minime decet, simulare non dedecet, Cic. Tusc. 4, 25; Ov. A. A. 2, 530: togam removeri, Quint. 11, 3, 124.—

(b) (Togae) extremam oram rejecisse non dedecet, Quint. 11, 3, 140; Hor. Od. 2, 12, 17.—

c Ut iis, quae habent, modice et scienter utantur, et ut ne dedeceat, Cic. de Or. 1, 29, 132. —

II By poet. license person. as a v. a., to dishonor, neglect a thing: si non dedecui tua jussa, Stat. Th. 10, 340: Atticus Claudiorum imagines dedecere videbatur, Tac. A. 2, 43.

In the wild

dedecere Cicero, Orator 74.p1
dedeceat Cicero, De Oratore 1.132
dedecet Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.689
dedecere Tacitus, Annales 2.p44
dedecet Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 11.3.104
dedecet Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12.6.3

6 of 20 attestations shown.

Where it came from

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

Downloads

Word record (JSON)·Concordance (CSV)·Frequencies (CSV)·Cite (BibTeX)

CC BY 4.0 with receipt attribution — every file carries its license line. What is exportable

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.