coz

Forms

coz f (plural coces)^[1] Old Spanish wrote coçe, coce, coz and coç in the singular and coçes, cozes or coces in the plural.^[2][1] The Old Aragonese Poema de Yúçuf still has the plural cálcex, and Ribagorza says calces today.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish coçe, inherited from Latin calx (“heel”).^[3][4][5][1] Spanish kept the feminine gender of classical Latin, while Vulgar Latin had already made the word masculine, as the other Romance outcomes are.^[3] Wiktionary names calce as a doublet.^[1]

The same word is Italian calce, Italian calcio, Portuguese coice and Galician couce, all meaning “kick”.^[3][6] Old Galician-Portuguese couce kept the sense “heel”, Old French chauz meant the heel of a stocking, and Occitan caus of Béarn and Gascony means a tree stump.^[6][3] The Catalan word for “kick”, Catalan coça, was once taken for a Castilian loan, but Corominas came to think it a native form.^[3]

De Vaan finds the comparison of the Latin word with Baltic and Slavic words for parts of the leg, such as Lithuanian kulkšnis (“ankle”), doubtful at best, and notes that others have argued for a non-Indo-European, perhaps Etruscan, source without a concrete model.^[7] The Latin word for “lime”, spelt the same, has a separate source, perhaps Greek.^[7]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas's first records are a charter of 1220 and Berceo.^[3][4] The CDH has coç in the Fuero de Zorita de los Canes (1218–c. 1250): Del que firiere a otro con coç “of him who strikes another with a kick”.^[8] Berceo uses the plural figuratively in the Sacrificio de la misa, of the Jews who answered God's favour by kicking out: ella tornó las coçes e fizo lo peor.^[9][10]

Semantic evolution

The kick of a beast was the first sense, and Alfonso X's prose already uses the word for a trampling.^[11] The proverbial dar coces contra el aguijón, “to kick against the goad”, appears in Alfonso de Palencia's 1490 vocabulary and in the Quijote.^[9][12] Covarrubias in 1611 also gave the recoil of a gun or crossbow, the phrase de hoz y de coz “rashly, without any thought”, and the proverb that the mare's kick does no harm to the foal.^[13]

Autoridades added the butt of the arquebus, and the Academy's later editions the backflow of water checked in its course.^[14][15] In 1869 the figurative sense of a rude act or word entered the dictionary.^[16] The sense “bottom or thick end of a tree or beam” is close to Latin uses: Pliny used calx for the foot of a fig shoot, and in Soria coz still names a tree trunk.^[3] In Honduras it is a notch in the plough or yoke.^[17]

Timeline

• a. 1141–1235 – the Fuero de Madrid, in a 13th-century copy, has ad cozes in its Latin text.^[8]
• 1220 – first record, in a charter.^[3][4]
• 1220–1250 – the derived verb cocear “to kick”.^[4]
• c. 1230–1260 – Berceo uses the plural coçes in the Sacrificio de la misa.^[18][9]
• 1272–1280 – Alfonso X's General estoria uses it for a kick and for a trampling.^[11]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija glosses coce as a blow with the heel, Latin calx.^[19]
• 1541 – first record in the Americas, in Michoacán.^[20]
• 1611 – Covarrubias records the recoil of a gun and the phrase de hoz y de coz.^[13]
• 1884 – the Academy gives the etymology from Latin calx for the first time.^[21]

Meanings

Noun

1. A kick of an animal: the sudden jerk of one or both legs that horses and other beasts make.^[5][1]
2. The blow given by such a kick: La mula le dio una coz en la rodilla.^[5][22]
3. A violent backward kick by a person.^[5]
4. The recoil of a firearm when it is fired.^[5]
5. The backflow of water whose course is blocked.^[5][22]
6. The butt of a gun (culata).^[5]
7. The lower or thicker end of a tree or a beam.^[5]
8. (colloquial) A rude or insulting act or remark: Contestó con una coz a la pregunta del vecino.^[5][22]
9. (nautical) The lower end of a topmast.^[5]

Word family

• cocear
• acocear
• coceador

Related words

• recalcitrar
• recalcitrante
• calce
• Latin calx
• Portuguese coice

Usage notes

The phrases dar coces contra el aguijón, “to resist a superior force in vain”, and andar a coz y bocado, “to romp about trading blows”, are in the DLE.^[5] A separate coz (de limas), a carpenter's square, is traced by Corriente, Pereira and Vicente to a Neo-Arabic phrase with kūs.^[23]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. coz
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 2, 232
4. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. coz
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. coz
6. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 1534
7. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ a b Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. coz
9. ^ a b c Alonso Pedraz, Martín (1986), Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, 2 vols., Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, p. 807
10. ^ Lanchetas, Rufino (1900), Gramática y vocabulario de las obras de Gonzalo de Berceo, Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, p. 263
11. ^ a b Kasten, Lloyd A.; Nitti, John J.; Gago Jover, Francisco (2002–), Diccionario de la prosa castellana del Rey Alfonso X, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (electronic edition 2024), p. s.v. coz
12. ^ Cejador y Frauca, Julio (1905–1906), La lengua de Cervantes: gramática y diccionario de la lengua castellana en El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols., Madrid: Jaime Ratés, p. 331
13. ^ a b Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 529
14. ^ Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. s.v. coz
15. ^ Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 251
16. ^ Real Academia Española (1869), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 11th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de Don Manuel Rivadeneyra, p. 219
17. ^ Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. coz
18. ^ Boggs, R. S.; Kasten, Lloyd; Keniston, Hayward; Richardson, H. B. (1946), Tentative Dictionary of Medieval Spanish, 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N.C., p. 150
19. ^ Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv, p. s.v. coz
20. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. coce
21. ^ Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 303
22. ^ a b c Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. coz
23. ^ Corriente, Federico; Pereira, Christophe; Vicente, Ángeles (2019), Dictionnaire des emprunts ibéro-romans: emprunts à l'arabe et aux langues du monde islamique (Encyclopédie linguistique d'Al-Andalus 3), Berlin: De Gruyter, p. s.v. coz