do

Do (doh), "I give," is one of the most heavily worn verbs in Latin, and the record shows it worn everywhere: 17,565 occurrences across 369 works. No single author owns it. The heaviest surfaces are Livy's Ab urbe condita, "From the Founding of the City" (1,592), Pliny's Naturalis Historia, "Natural History" (718), Seneca's De Beneficiis, "On Benefits" (620) — fittingly, a treatise on giving itself — Cicero's Letters to Atticus (470) and his prosecution In C. Verrem, "Against Verres" (422), and Ovid's Metamorphoses (403). History, natural science, moral philosophy, private correspondence, oratory, epic: giving is done in all of them.

The lexicon record is fragmentary here. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) supplies the paradigm — do, dedi, datum, dare, "give" — and the longer byform danunt for dant ("they give"). But the dictionary's clearest ancestry note actually belongs to a neighbor: the entry for the obsolete -do, -dare, a root surviving "only in the compounds" — abdo ("put away"), condo ("found," "store up"), abscondo ("hide away"), indo ("put in"), and others. That placing-root Lewis & Short (1879) refers to a Sanskrit root dha-, dadhami ("set, put, place"), and gestures toward a Greek cognate before the record breaks off mid-word — the exact form is not preserved. It is distinct in sense from the giving-verb, and the brief keeps the two as separate headwords. Walde-Hofmann (Lateinisches etymologisches Woerterbuch, 1938–54) also appears, but its matched line is a garbled fragment glossing an Old Irish do ("two") — nothing usable here.

No etymology pointer is matched in the record for do itself; the only ancestry preserved is what Lewis & Short (1879) notes for its sibling root, and even that trails off unfinished.

Every citable passage in the brief is Livy, the verb caught mid-conjugation through the first two books of Ab urbe condita: dabant ("they were giving"), daret ("he might give"), data ("given"), dedit ("he gave").

When a word means simply "to give," and lives in every kind of book at once, where do you look to find its life?