The corpus record — Latin

peniculus

peniculus · m

A brush

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

Where it lives

Menaechmi 3 · 3.16/10k
Eunuchus 1 · 0.92/10k
Rudens 1 · 0.84/10k
Res Gestae 1 · 0.08/10k

What it meant

pēnĭcŭlus — Lewis & Short

pēnĭcŭlus, i, m.dim.penis, lit., a little tail; hence,

I A brush for removing dust (for which ox-tails and horse-tails were used): (a pene) peniculi, quis calciamenta tergentur, quod e codis extremis faciebant antiqui, etc., Fest. p. 230 Müll.: juventus nomen fecit Peniculo mihi, ideo quia mensam, quando edo, detergeo, Plaut. Men. 1, 1, 1; cf.: Quis iste'st Peniculus? Qui extergentur baxeae? id. ib. 2, 3, 40.—

II A sponge: ut peniculus novos exurgeri solet, Plaut. Rud. 4, 3, 69; Ter. Eun. 4, 7, 7; Amm. 15, 5, 4; cf.: peniculi spongiae longae propter similitudinem caudarum appellatae, Paul. ex Fest. p. 208 Müll. —

III A painter's brush or pencil, Dig. 33, 7, 17.—

IV Perh., in an ambiguous sense, = membrum virile, Plaut. Men. 2, 2, 12.

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.