patio

Forms

patio m (plural patios)^[1]

Etymology

It is probably borrowed from Catalan pati (“yard; building plot”), a word shared with Old Occitan patu and its variant pati, which meant a communal pasture or waste land.^[2][3] Corominas holds that Spanish certainly took the word from Occitan or Catalan, although early, and that Catalan was the go-between.^[3][2] In his Catalan dictionary he says that the word passed from Catalan into Spanish, and into Portuguese as pátio.^[4] Prat Sabater counts it among the Catalanisms of the 15th century.^[5] In Castile the old word for the space was corral.^[2][3]

The Occitan word is older: the DCECH's earliest Romance example is a charter from Nîmes of about 1150, and the Medieval Latin of southern France had patuum from 1144.^[3] Its further origin is uncertain.^[3][6] The Breve diccionario derives it from Latin pactus (“agreement; lease”), which would have passed from “leased pasture” to “waste land” and then to “unbuilt space behind or inside a building”.^[2][7][8] Du Cange records the Latin word in a charter of 1187 in the sense “pasture”.^[9] The DCECH grants that this is possible for Catalan and Occitan, but finds that it does not explain every detail of the forms.^[3] Corominas therefore prefers a pre-Roman Indo-European word related to the Baltic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian words for pasture and for keeping cattle.^[3][4] Wiktionary gives both this Latin source and pateō (“to lie open”) as possibilities.^[1]

Earlier proposals were an Arabic word for a broad river-bed, which the DCECH rules out, and a Late Latin adjective patidus (“open”) from the verb meaning “to lie open”, which fails because its /t/ would have been voiced.^[3] Covarrubias in 1611 had already traced the word to this verb, and the Academy's dictionary of 1899 to patulus (“open”).^[10][11]

Earliest recorded meaning

Nebrija's Vocabulario of about 1495, the first record, equates patio with patín and glosses patio entre colunas with Latin intercolumnium: a courtyard surrounded by columns.^[3][12] For Corominas this shows that the word first named a special architectural type, the peristyle court, which was not a popular word.^[3] A little earlier the form patín appears in the Crónica de Iranzo, written in 1456, where bulls are run en el patín “in the courtyard” of an inn.^[3]

Semantic evolution

By the middle of the 16th century the word was in normal use, as in the Lazarillo, but for a long time it still meant the courtyard of a rich house, a public building or a palace, surrounded by a cloister.^[3] Covarrubias in 1611 defines it as the open part of the house surrounded by galleries, and adds that casa de patio meant a house of standing.^[10] Autoridades also gives the open court of a university, where the classrooms stood and students met, and that of the councils and courts, where litigants gathered.^[13] In the old theatres the patio was the middle of the playhouse where the mosqueteros stood.^[13] The word slowly lost its grandeur, and Autoridades already allows the ordinary walled yard of today.^[3]

The Academy's dictionary of 1817 adds the area between the theatre seats and the entrance, and the strip between the rows of trees and the edge of a field.^[14] Today patio de butacas is the stalls of a theatre and patio de luces an inner light well, and the colloquial cómo está el patio refers to a state of things.^[6][15] In Mexico the word names a railway yard, in Cuba a place where fighting cocks are bred, and in Guatemala a sloping platform for drying coffee beans.^[6][16][17] English borrowed it in 1818 for an inner court open to the sky, and by 1941 it meant a paved terrace beside a house.^[18]

Timeline

• c. 1150 – the Occitan word appears in a charter from Nîmes.^[3]
• 1207 – first record of Catalan pati.^[4]
• 1417 – DICCA-XV's first example of the word in the Castilian of the Crown of Aragon.^[19]
• 1456 – the Crónica de Iranzo has the form patín.^[3]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija records patio.^[3][2]
• 1525 – first record in the Americas, in Mexico City.^[20]
• 1611 – Covarrubias defines it as the open part of a house enclosed by galleries.^[10]
• 1817 – the Academy adds the theatre and field senses.^[14]
• 1818 – first record of the English word patio.^[18]
• 1899 – the Academy's dictionary derives it from Latin patulus.^[11]

Meanings

Noun

1. A courtyard or patio: a space enclosed by walls or galleries and usually open to the sky, in a house or other building.^[6][1]
2. (education) A schoolyard;^[1] (Spain) the break between classes.^[1]
3. (theatre) The stalls, short for patio de butacas.^[6]
4. The strip of ground between the rows of trees and the edge of a field.^[6]
5. (historical) In the old open-air playhouses, the area in front of the stage where the audience stood.^[6][13]
6. (colloquial) The situation, the state of affairs: Con lo revuelto que anda el patio, mejor esperamos.^[6]
7. (Mexico) An open area near a railway station where locomotives are shunted.^[6]
8. (Guatemala) A sloping brick or concrete platform on which coffee beans are dried in the sun.^[17]

Word family

• traspatio
• patio de luces
• patio de butacas

Related words

• corral
• Catalan pati
• Portuguese pátio

Usage notes

The earliest hits of patio in the CDH, in the works of Juan Fernández de Heredia (1376–1399), are a separate word: a semi-learned patio “pact, agreement” from Latin pactum.^[21][19]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. patio
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 4, 429
4. ^ a b c Coromines, Joan (1980–2001), Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana, 10 vols., Barcelona: Curial / La Caixa (online ed., Institut d'Estudis Catalans 2024), p. 6, 336
5. ^ Prat Sabater, Marta (2003), Préstamos del catalán en el léxico español, doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, p. 345
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i 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. patio
7. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. patio
8. ^ Gómez de Silva, Guido (1988), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica / El Colegio de México, p. s.v. patio
9. ^ du Cange, Charles du Fresne, et al. (1883–1887), Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, augmented ed. by Léopold Favre, Niort: L. Favre, p. s.v. pactus
10. ^ a b c Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de (1611), Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Madrid: Luis Sánchez (Biblioteca Wordkers transcription, CC BY 4.0), p. 1199
11. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1899), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 13th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de los Sres. Hernando y Compañía, p. 751
12. ^ Nebrija, Antonio de (1513), Vocabulario español-latino, Salamanca, ed. Marina Vidal Díez (2007), Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, p. 394
13. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. 5, 164
14. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 648
15. ^ Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. patio
16. ^ Alemany y Bolufer, José (1917), Diccionario de la lengua española, Barcelona: Ramón Sopena, p. 1277
17. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. patio
18. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
19. ^ a b 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. patio
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. patio
21. ^ Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. patio