The corpus record — Latin

mĕlĭor

better*: *mj-ies-iH

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

What it meant

1. melior — de Vaan

melior 'better*: *mj-ies-iH 'the better one, chief spouse' > *moliesi » nom. *moliesis. This requires two more assumptions which are without a parallel: firstly, *olj > ulj. This is unlikely, since *y has turned to i in all of OLat. (mulier), whereas the change olC > ulC is dated to the second century BC (Meiser 1998: 84). Secondly, the nom. *moliesis would have analogically been remade into *molies/r, which is … — [de Vaan, s.v. melior, p. 407]

2. mĕlĭor — Lewis & Short

mĕlĭor, melĭuscf. ma=llon, for ma/lion, v. bonus.

3. melior — Walde–Hofmann

melior, -/us, Gen. -iöris „besser“ (seit Naev., rom., ebenso meliörö, -äre „verbessere“ seit Dig. [-G4i9 seit Eccl]; meliusculus, -a, -um „etwas besser“ seit Plaut. (Adv. -£ seit Cic.]): samt multus „viel“ (*mjtós, s. d.) zu Wz. *mel- „stark, groß“ in gr. uda. „sehr“ (vgl. tdxa usw., Brugmann-Thumb 294 [anders Schwyzer KZ. 58, 184; phantastisch Mahlow Neue Wege 509]), uààÀov „mehr“ (für *uéAAov — lat. melius nach … — [Walde–Hofmann, s.v. melior, p. 969]

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.