The corpus record — Latin

maculo

maculo · v. a

to make spotted, to spot, speckle, variegate

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

Where it lives

Medicamina faciei femineae 1 · 16.31/10k
Pausanias 1 · 11.34/10k
Culex, Appendix Vergiliana 2 · 7.65/10k
Phoenissae 2 · 4.89/10k
In Eutropium 3 · 4.18/10k
Apotheosis 3 · 4.05/10k
De Cultu Feminarum 2 · 3.9/10k
Carus et Carinus et Numerianus 1 · 3.77/10k
Agamemnon 2 · 3.6/10k
Oedipus 2 · 3.37/10k
Troades 2 · 2.94/10k
De Pallio 1 · 2.92/10k

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

What it meant

măcŭlo — Lewis & Short

măcŭlo, āvi, ātum, 1, v. a.1. macula,

I to make spotted, to spot, speckle, variegate.

I Lit.

A In gen. (only poet.), to stain, tinge, dye: telas maculare ostro, Val. Fl. 4, 368: et multo maculatum murice tigrim, id. 6, 704.—

B In partic., to spot, stain, defile, pollute: maculari corpus maculis luridis, Plaut. Capt. 3, 4, 63: solum sanguine, Cat. 63, 7; cf.: terram tabo, Verg. A. 3, 29: dextra maculata cruore, Ov. de Nuce, 157.—

II Trop. (acc. to I. B.), to defile, dishonor, disgrace, etc. (freq. in Cic.): rex ille optimi regis caede maculatus, Cic. Rep. 2, 25, 46; cf.: partus suos parricidio, Liv. 1, 13: nemora nefario stupro, Cic. Mil. 31, 85: Catonis splendorem, id. Sest. 28, 60: tuum maculavi crimine nomen, Verg. A. 10, 851: inde metus maculat poenarum praemia vitae, spoils, Lucr. 5, 1151: obsoleta quoque (verba) et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu ponit, Gell. 16, 7, 4.—Hence, măcŭ-lātim, adv., in a spotted or mottled fashion (late Lat.), Aug. Gen. ad Lit. 5, 10.

In the wild

maculant Horace, Satyrarum libri 1.5.85
maculas Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 20.2.p1
maculas Ovid, Fasti 3.821
maculetur Claudian, Carminum minorum corpusculum 50.13
maculatas Silius Italicus, Punica 13.305
maculat Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.1151

6 of 122 attestations shown.

Where it came from

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

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.