The corpus record — Latin

descriptio

a marking out, delineation, copy, transcript

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

Where it lives

Academica 4 · 8.21/10k
Suasoriae 5 · 4.87/10k
Firmus Saturninus, Proculus et Bonosus 1 · 4.32/10k
De Architectura 24 · 4.16/10k
Liber De Persona et Duabus Naturis Contra Eutychen Et Nestorium 2 · 3.43/10k
De Partitione Oratoria 3 · 3.06/10k
Topica 2 · 2.92/10k
De Lege Agraria 3 · 2.18/10k
De Inventione 7 · 2.11/10k
De Corona 1 · 2.06/10k
Controversiae 13 · 1.97/10k
De Praescriptionibus Hereticorum 1 · 1.2/10k

Densest 12 of 29 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

dēscriptĭo — Lewis & Short

dēscriptĭo, ōnis (in MSS. and edd. often confounded with discriptio,

I v. infra), f. describo (freq. in Cic.), a marking out, delineation, copy, transcript: in concreto.

I Lit. (rare): eadem caeli descriptio, Cic. Rep. 6, 22; cf. id. ib. 1, 14: explicate descriptionem imaginemque tabularum, Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 77 fin. In plur.: numeris aut descriptionibus aliquid explicare, id. Tusc. 1, 17: volutarum, sketches, drawings, Vitr. 3, 3: orbis terrarum, maps, id. 8, 2 et saep. —Far more freq.,

II Trop.

A A representation, delineation, description: nominis brevis et aperta descriptio, Cic. Inv. 2, 18: dilucida locorum, Quint. 9, 2, 44: regionum, id. 4, 3, 12: Siciliae, id. 11, 3, 164: convivii luxuriosi, id. 8, 3, 66 et saep.—In rhetor., the delineating of character, Cic. Top. 22, 83; id. de Or. 3, 53, 205; Quint. 9, 1, 31; cf. Auct. Her. 4, 39, 51.—

B A proper disposition, order, arrangement: via descriptionis atque ordinis (in oratione), id. de Or. 2, 9, 36: aedificandi, id. Off. 1, 39; legionum et auxiliorum, Suet. Tib. 30: descriptio centuriarum classiumque non erat, Liv. 4, 4, 2: populi, Vulg. 2 Reg. 24, 9.—In plur.: descriptiones temporum, id. Ac. 1, 3, 19 et saep. (Descriptio is often found in MSS. and edd. in the sense of distribution, division; but here the proper form is discriptio, e. g. Cic. Rep. 2, 22; id. de Off. 1, 7, 21 saep.)

In the wild

descriptionibus Vitruvius, De Architectura 9.8.15.p2
descriptionem Cicero, In C. Verrem 2.2.190
descriptionem Cicero, De Oratore 2.63
descriptio Cicero, De Inventione 2.55.p2
descriptiones Pliny the Younger, Letters 2.5.5
descriptionibus Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 23.6.1

6 of 102 attestations shown.

Where it came from

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

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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.