The corpus record — Latin

obscaenus

unpropitious, ill-omened; indecent

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

Where it lives

de bello Gildonico 1 · 3.16/10k
Naturalis Historia 1 · 0.03/10k

What it meant

obscaenus — de Vaan

obscaenus 'unpropitious, ill-omened; indecent' [adj. ο/ά] (P1.+; the second vowel vacillates between ae and e) Pit *skai-no- 'left, unpropitious'. PIE *skeh2-i-no- 'shaded; left'. IE cognates: see s.v. scaevus. Since e can be a phonetic development for ae in second syllable (*a/ > *e > ί) whereas ae cannot be explained if the original vowel was e, obscaenus must be the original form. EM propose to compare scaevus … — [de Vaan, s.v. obscaenus, p. 436]

In the wild

obscaenus Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 28.1.p2
obscaenus Claudian, de bello Gildonico 1.166

Where it came from

de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) Treated in de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) s.v. obscaenus (scan p. 436; entry #1190). Root candidates: *skaino-.

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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.