The corpus record — Latin

desperatio

desperatio · f

hopelessness, despair

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

Where it lives

Hamilcar 1 · 19.34/10k
Otho 1 · 6.34/10k
Cum Senatui Gratias Egit 2 · 4.62/10k
Eumenes 1 · 4.37/10k
Carus et Carinus et Numerianus 1 · 3.77/10k
Pro C. Rabirio Perduellionis Reo Ad Quirites 1 · 2.82/10k
Nero 2 · 2.56/10k
De Paenitentia 1 · 2.45/10k
Historiae Alexandri Magni 16 · 2.16/10k
Epistulae, Books VIII-IX 2 · 1.58/10k
Historiae 8 · 1.55/10k
De Tranquillitate Animi 1 · 1.32/10k

Densest 12 of 51 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

dēspērātĭo — Lewis & Short

dēspērātĭo, ōnis, f.despero,

I hopelessness, despair: desperatio est aegritudo sine ulla rerum exspectatione meliorum, Cic. Tusc. 4, 8, 18.

I Prop. (good prose and very freq.).

(a) With gen.: omnium rerum amissio et desperatio recuperandi, Cic. Fam. 4, 3, 2: omnium rerum, id. Cat. 2, 11 fin. (opp. bona spes); Liv. 21, 1; Suet. Ner. 2 et saep.: victoriae, Cic. Phil. 8, 5: magna pacis, Caes. B. C. 1, 11, 3: omnium salutis, id. ib. 1, 5, 3; Liv. 3, 2 et saep.—

(b) Absol.: magna desperatione affectus, Cic. Att. 14, 19: ad summam desperationem pervenire, Caes. B. C. 2, 42, 2: ad desperationem adducti, Nep. Eum. 12; cf.: ad desperationem redactus, Suet. Aug. 81: in desperatione esse, Front. Strat. 3, 17, 7: ad desperationem formidine properare, Tac. H. 2, 46 et saep.: a desperatione iram accendit, Liv. 31, 17; cf. Tac. H. 2, 44 fin.—In plur.: desperationes eorum, qui, etc., Cic. Fam. 2, 16, 6.—

II Meton., desperate boldness, foolhardiness: desperatio truculentae feminae, Ap. M. 10, p. 251: periculosa, Vulg. 2 Reg. 2, 26; id. Sirach, 27, 24.

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.