quoque

Quoque (KWOH-kweh, "also, too") is one of the small connective words a language cannot do without, and the record shows it everywhere prose is written: 11,588 occurrences across 333 works — among the widest distributions in the corpus. It has no single home because it belongs to the sentence itself — the particle you subjoin to whatever you want to add. Its heaviest surfaces are the great compilations and technical books: the Naturalis Historia ("Natural History," 1,191), the Ab urbe condita ("From the Founding of the City," 1,056), the Institutio Oratoria ("The Orator's Education," 742), the De Medicina ("On Medicine," 702), the Noctes Atticae ("Attic Nights," 473), and the Historiae Alexandri Magni ("Histories of Alexander the Great," 304) — works that catalogue, argue, and qualify, the writing that most needs to say "this too."

Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) glosses it plainly as a conjunction, "also, too," and specifies the grammar the frequency counts cannot show: it is "subjoined to the emphatic word in a clause." That is, quoque leans back on the word before it and marks it as the added thing. The dictionary illustrates with a single clause — quā de causa Helvetii quoque reliquo… ("for which reason the Helvetii too…") — where quoque clings to Helvetii ("the Helvetii") and adds them to the count. Lewis & Short keep a second, homographic entry: quōque (KWOH-kweh), "= et quo" ("and whither" / "and by which"), a different word spelled the same.

On the etymology the record is cautious. Lewis & Short call the derivation "dub." (doubtful) and pass on an old conjecture — "perhaps for quomque." One further pointer is matched: the word is treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine (DELL, 1932; 4th ed. 1959), s.v. quoque — recorded, though no root is quoted. The cited surfaces are Livy's, from the first book of the Ab urbe condita.

If a word means only "and this one too," does it name anything, or only point?