The corpus record — Latin

semivir

semivir · adj

a half-man

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

Where it lives

Cupido cruciatur 1 · 13.57/10k
Epigrammata Ausonii de diversis rebus 2 · 5.49/10k
In Eutropium 2 · 2.78/10k
Panegyricus de sexto consulatu Honorii Augusti 1 · 2.4/10k
Agamemnon 1 · 1.8/10k
Achilleis 1 · 1.39/10k
Carmina 2 · 0.89/10k
Octavius 1 · 0.86/10k
Contra Symmachum 1 · 0.83/10k
Ars Amatoria 1 · 0.67/10k
Peristephanon Liber 1 · 0.57/10k
Argonautica 2 · 0.54/10k

Densest 12 of 24 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

sēmĭ-vĭr — Lewis & Short

sēmĭ-vĭr, vĭri, m.adj.,

I a half-man, i. q. semihomo and semimas (not anteAug.).

I Lit.

A Half man and half beast, e. g. the Centaur Chiron. Ov. F. 5, 380; the Minotaur, id. A. A. 2, 24 (cf. semibos): Nessus, id. H. 9, 141.—

B An hermaphrodite, Ov. M. 4, 386; Plin. 11, 49, 110, § 263.—

II Transf., emasculated.

A Lit., of a priest of Cybele (cf. semimas), Juv. 6, 513: semiviri chori, Sil. 17, 20: formosum adulescentem semivirum reddidit, Lact. 1, 17, 7. —

B Trop., unmanly, womanish, effeminate: et nunc ille Paris cum semiviro comitatu, Verg. A. 4, 215: Phryx, id. ib. 12, 99; Lact. 1, 10, 9; Stat. Achill. 2, 363.—So esp. of debauchees: qui tam atrocem caedem pertinere ad illos semiviros crederent (for which, just before: molles and obsceni viri), Liv. 33, 28, 7: impure ac semivir, Luc. 8, 552.

In the wild

semivir Lucan, Pharsalia 8.552
semivir Ovid, Fasti 5.380
semiviro Vergil, Aeneid 4.215
Semiviri Martial, Epigrammata 9.20.8
semiuiros Silius Italicus, Punica 11.105
semivirum Ausonius, Epigrammata Ausonii de diversis rebus 76.11

6 of 33 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.