The corpus record — Latin

woman

at the verge of parting

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

Where it lives

Heautontimorumenos 2 · 1.82/10k
Andria 1 · 1.02/10k
Phormio 1 · 0.92/10k

What it meant

woman — de Vaan

woman 'at the verge of parting' (Paul ex F. inciens propinqua partui) as opposed to gravida and praegnans, which were more general terms for 'pregnant'. Of course, this might be a recent semantic specialization. Nevertheless, if inciens derives from a verb *inciere of the same semantic structure as incipere £to take in hand, start, begin an action', it could mean 'starting to give rise to, giving birth'. In that … — [de Vaan, s.v. woman, p. 315]

In the wild

woman Terence, Andria front.subject_1
woman Terence, Heautontimorumenos front.subject_1
woman Terence, Phormio front.subject_1
woman Terence, Heautontimorumenos front.subject_1

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. woman (scan pp. 315-316; entry #811).

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.