The corpus record — Latin

taxus

yew-tree

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

Where it lives

Georgicon 4 · 2.83/10k
Eclogues 1 · 2.2/10k
Oedipus 1 · 1.69/10k
Thyestes 1 · 1.59/10k
Divus Claudius 1 · 1.57/10k
de raptu Proserpinae 1 · 1.43/10k
Punica 4 · 0.52/10k
Silvae 1 · 0.4/10k
Pharsalia 2 · 0.39/10k
Thebais 2 · 0.32/10k
Argonautica 1 · 0.27/10k
Res Rustica, Books I-IX 1 · 0.13/10k

Densest 12 of 13 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

1. taxus — de Vaan

taxus 'yew-tree' [fi o] (Enn.+) IE cognates: Gr. τόξον 'bow\ Myc. to-ko-so-wo-L· /tokso-worgos/'bow-maker'. Since yews are the usual wood for making bows from Mesolithic times onward, taxus must be connected with Gr. τόξον, which was regarded as a loanword from Scythian *tax$a- 'bow\ but is already present in Mycenaean. Yet taxus cannot be a direct borrowing from Greek, nor (as far as the meaning is concerned) from … — [de Vaan, s.v. taxus, p. 621]

2. taxus — Lewis & Short

taxus, i, f.,

I a yew, yew-tree.

I Lit., Plin. 16, 10, 20, § 50; Caes. B. G. 6, 31; Verg. E. 9, 30; id. G. 2, 113 al. — Considered, on account of its poisonous berries, as a tree of the infernal regions, Ov. M. 4, 432; Sil. 13, 596; Luc. 3, 419; 6, 645 al.—

II Poet., transf., a javelin, made of the wood of the yew-tree, Sil. 13, 210.

In the wild

6 of 23 attestations shown.

Where it came from

de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) Treated in de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) s.v. taxus (scan pp. 621-622; entry #1771). Root candidates: *tekw-.
Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine Treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine s.v. taxus (scan p. 702; entry #11665).

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.