The corpus record — Latin

Hem

Hem · interj

oho! indeed! well! well to be sure! hah! alas! alack! Ag

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

Where it lives

Andria 30 · 30.45/10k
Phormio 26 · 23.98/10k
Adelphi 22 · 22.23/10k
Eunuchus 15 · 13.83/10k
Hecyra 9 · 9.98/10k
Heautontimorumenos 10 · 9.1/10k
Cistellaria 2 · 3.82/10k
Stichus 2 · 3.22/10k
De Pallio 1 · 2.92/10k
Aulularia 2 · 2.9/10k
Poenulus 3 · 2.72/10k
Casina 2 · 2.58/10k

Densest 12 of 22 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

hem — Lewis & Short

hem (also em, and often confounded in MSS. and edd. with em and en, q. v.), interj., an expression of surprise, in a good or bad sense; of admiration, joy, of grief, indignation, etc. (like the intensive ehem, an expression of joyful surprise),

I oho! indeed! well! well to be sure! hah! alas! alack! Ag. Ego sum ipsus, quem tu quaeris. Ha. Hem! quid ego audio? Plaut. Poen. 5, 2, 86; cf. Ter. And. 3, 1, 4: hem, Pamphile, optime te mihi offers, id. ib. 4, 2, 3: Er. Itane Chrysis? hem! My. Nos quidem pol miseras perdidit, Ter. And. 4, 5, 8; cf. id. Eun. 5, 1, 11: miserum me! quanto haec dixi cum dolore! hem, Postume, tune es, etc., Cic. Rab. Post. 17, 45: occepi mecum cogitare: hem, biduum hic Manendum est soli sine illa, Ter. Eun. 4, 2, 8: hem tibi maledictis pro istis, Plaut. Curc. 1, 3, 39; cf. id. Ps. 1, 2, 22: hem, quid ais, scelus? Ter. And. 4, 1, 42; cf.: audistin', obsecro? hem scelera, id. ib. 4, 4, 47: hem nos homunculi indignamur, si quis, etc., Sulp. ap. Cic. Fam. 4, 5, 4; Ter. Phorm. 4, 4, 7.

In the wild

6 of 143 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.