The corpus record — Latin

semifer

semifer · adj

halfbestial

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

Where it lives

Panegyricus de tertio consulatu Honorii Augusti 1 · 7.24/10k
Epithalamium de nuptiis Honorii Augusti 1 · 4.57/10k
Appendix Vergiliana 1 · 2.88/10k
Phoenissae 1 · 2.45/10k
Hercules Oetaeus 2 · 1.78/10k
Hamartigenia 1 · 1.56/10k
In Eutropium 1 · 1.39/10k
Achilleis 1 · 1.39/10k
Apotheosis 1 · 1.35/10k
Carminum minorum corpusculum 1 · 1.18/10k
Argonautica 3 · 0.81/10k
Carmina 1 · 0.45/10k

Densest 12 of 22 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

sēmĭ-fer — Lewis & Short

sēmĭ-fer, fĕra, fĕrum, adj.ferus,

I halfbestial, half man and half beast.

I Lit.: semifer interea divinae stirpis alumno Laetus erat, i. e. the Centaur Chiron, Ov. M. 2, 633; so of the Centaurs, id. ib. 12, 406; Stat. Th. 9, 220; Luc. 6, 386: caput Panis, Lucr. 4, 587: pectus (Tritonis), Verg. A. 10, 212: corpus Capricorni (because half goat and half fish), Cic. Arat. 59 Orell. N. cr.: species hominum (with portenta), Lucr. 2, 702 et saep.—

II Trop., half-wild, half-savage: (Cacus), Verg. A. 8, 267 (for which, semihomo, id. ib. 194): glires semiferum animal, Plin. 8, 57, 82, § 224: proles (canis), Grat. Cyn. 253: genus hominum, Plin. 6, 19, 22, § 66; Sil. 3, 542.

In the wild

semiferas Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 2.702
semiferos Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 8.53
semiferos Lucan, Pharsalia 6.386
semifer Statius, Silvae 2.1.89
semiferi Appendix Vergiliana, Appendix Vergiliana 494
semiferi Claudian, Panegyricus de tertio consulatu Honorii Augusti 1.61

6 of 34 attestations shown.

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.