deus

Deus (deus, "DAY-oos," "god, deity") is one of the most heavily attested words in this Latin corpus: 13,880 occurrences spread across 336 works. Its record leans Christian and argumentative. The largest single share falls in Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem (1,452, "Against Marcion"), and the same author returns with Adversus Praxean (399, "Against Praxeas") and Adversus Hermogenem (292, "Against Hermogenes") — polemics that hammer at what and who deus is. Between and around them sit the classical monuments: Livy's Ab urbe condita (549, "From the Founding of the City") and Cicero's de Natura Deorum (536, "On the Nature of the Gods"), alongside a set of Epistulae. Selections. (357, "Letters. Selections."). The word lives where Rome names its gods and where the Church argues its one God.

The lexica keep the gloss plain. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) gives simply "a god, a deity," and dwells on the tangled forms — the vocative singular deus ("deus," the address-form), the nominative plural di or dei ("gods"). de Vaan (Etymological Dictionary of Latin, Brill 2008) glosses it "god, deity" and preserves the oldest surfaces: the archaic deiuos ("deiuos," old Latin "god") of the Duenos inscription and deiva ("deiva," "goddess") from third-century Pisaurum, and heads the family with dea ("goddess") and divus ("a god; godlike").

Two etymology pointers are matched, both recorded rather than reconstructed: de Vaan (Brill 2008) and Ernout-Meillet (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine, DELL, 1932; 4th ed. 1959) each treat deus directly, though the record carries their entries as references without spelling out a root.

The cited passages are all Livy, book by book — deum, deos, di, deo ("of gods, the gods, gods, to a god"), the noun turning through its cases as the historian counts the gods of early Rome.

When a word names both a crowd of Roman gods and the single God of the apologists, is it one word, or two wearing the same letters?