LOGOI

The corpus record — Latin

numquam

numquam · adv

at no time, never

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

Where it lives

Densest 12 of 314 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

numquam — Lewis & Short

numquam or nunquam (both in good use; the former prevails before the Augustan age), adv.ne-umquam,

I at no time, never: numquam edepol med istoc vinces, Plaut. Stich. 5, 5, 13: quod (principium) si numquam oritur, ne occidit quidem umquam, Cic. Rep. 6, 25, 27; id. Att. 14, 13, 6: videre mihi videor tantam dimicationem, quanta numquam fuit, id. ib. 7, 1, 2: illum numquam, dum haec natio viveret sine curā futurum, id. Sest. 63, 132: numquam ante hoc tempus, Caes. B. G. 1, 44: numquam donec, Liv. 34, 23.—
B Followed by a negative.
1 By a clause with quin, ut non, to denote that which always occurs: numquam fui usquam, quin me omnes amarent plurimum, Ter. Eun. 5, 9, 62: numquam epistulam tuam accipio, ut non protinus una simus, Sen. Ep. 40, 1.—
2 With a negative in the same clause, affirmatively: numquam non ineptum, always, Cic. de Or. 1, 24, 112; id. Fam. 12, 18, 1; Sen. Ep. 11, 4; cf.: probi mores numquam non plurimum profuerint, Quint. 7, 2, 33: numquam nisi honorificentissime Pompeium appellat, never otherwise than, always, Cic. Fam. 6, 6, 10.—*
II For non, not, by no means: qui hodie numquam ad vesperam vivam! Plaut. As. 3, 3, 40: numquam omnes hodie moriemur inulti, Verg. A. 2, 670: numquam hodie effugies, by no means, id. E. 3, 49; cf. Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 270; id. Mil. 4, 4, 56; Ter. Heaut. 3, 1, 44: nihil in mentem? numquam quidquam ( = prorsus nihil), Ter. Ad. 4, 1, 12; cf. Plaut. Capt. 1, 1, 8.

In the wild

6 of 3,283 attestations shown.

Where it came from

  • Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine Treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine s.v. numquam (scan p. 456; entry #7346).

Downloads

CC BY 4.0 with receipt attribution — every file carries its license line. What is exportable

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.