The corpus record — Latin

vae

vae · interj

ah! alas!

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

Where it lives

Mercator 9 · 10.51/10k
Asinaria 4 · 4.95/10k
Captivi 4 · 4.62/10k
Epidicus 3 · 4.61/10k
Casina 3 · 3.86/10k
Apocolocyntosis 1 · 3.69/10k
Stichus 2 · 3.22/10k
Menaechmi 3 · 3.16/10k
Miles Gloriosus 4 · 3.15/10k
Amphitruo 3 · 3.05/10k
Adelphi 3 · 3.03/10k
Adversus Marcionem 25 · 3.02/10k

Densest 12 of 48 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

vae — Lewis & Short

vae, interj.ou)ai/, an exclamation of pain or dread,

I ah! alas!

(a) Absol.: Mantua, vae, miserae nimium vicina Cremonae, Verg. E. 9, 28; Hor. C. 1, 13, 3: vae verbero! Plaut. Mil. 2, 3, 51.—

(b) Very freq. like the Gr. ou)ai/ and our woe! with dat.: vae misero mihi! Plaut. Am. 2, 2, 94; Ter. Heaut. 2, 3, 9: mihi, id. Eun. 4, 4, 42: illi, Plaut. As. 2, 2, 7: tergo meo, id. Men. 2, 2, 3; cf. id. Capt. 3, 4, 117: capiti atque aetati tuae, id. Rud. 2, 3, 44.—Esp., in the exclamation ascribed to Brennus: vae victis! intoleranda Romanis vox, Liv. 5, 48, 9; Flor. 1, 13, 17; Fest. p. 372 Müll.; Plaut. Ps. 5, 2, 19; also, as title of a Satire by Varro, v. Non. 82, 17; 156, 13; 492, 8 (Müll. de victis).—

(g) Very rarely with acc.: vae te! woe to you! Plaut. As. 2, 4, 75: scelesta, vae te! Cat. 8, 15: vae me! Sen. Apocol. 4, 3.

In the wild

6 of 117 attestations shown.

Where it came from

No etymology authority pointer is recorded for this lemma yet — an honest gap, not an omission.

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.