romanus

In the record, Romanus (roh-MAH-nus, "Roman") lives exactly where you would expect and nowhere apologetically: 12,866 occurrences across 270 works. It is not a rare or poetic word; it is the corpus's standing self-description.

The distribution has one gravitational center. Livy's Ab urbe condita (rendered here "From the Founding of the City") holds 3,871 of those occurrences — nearly a third of the total, and more than seven times the next work. After Livy the word settles into the prose of oratory and record: In C. Verrem ("Against Verres," 519), Annales ("Annals," 283), Philippicae ("Philippics," 265), Facta et Dicta Memorabilia ("Memorable Deeds and Sayings," 245), and Naturalis Historia ("Natural History," 239). These are histories, prosecutions, and catalogues — the genres in which Rome takes stock of itself. Romanus is the word by which the corpus keeps naming its own subject.

The lexical record here is silent: the brief carries zero lexicon entries and zero etymology pointers for this lemma. That is an honest gap — no dated authority in the record glosses the word or traces its root, and none is imported from outside the record.

What the record does preserve is the word in use, and every cited surface comes from Livy's first two books: Romani, Romana, Romanae, Romanam, Romanum [livy:phi0011-perseus-lat2:p1 through p16] — the adjective declining through gender and case as it attaches itself to army, people, name, and thing. The concordance shows not a definition but a habit: at the founding of the city, everything is already being sorted into what is Roman and what is not.

When a word appears twelve thousand times but never in the record's dictionaries, is it a word the language defines, or one it simply assumes?