placer

Forms

placer (first-person singular present plazco, first-person singular preterite plací, past participle placido)^[1] Old Spanish wrote plazer; its forms include plaze, plogo, plega and plazera.^[2][3] Autoridades notes the preterite plugo, earlier plogo, and the subjunctives plazca, plegue, pluguiera and pluguiese.^[4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin placeō (“to please”).^[5][6][1] The noun placer “pleasure” is the infinitive used as a noun, already in the 12th century.^[5][7][8]

The same Latin verb is Portuguese prazer, Galician pracer, Catalan plaure, Occitan plaire, French plaire, Italian piacere and Romanian plăcea.^[9][1] Several Romance languages made a noun of the infinitive, as Spanish did: the Italian word itself, French plaisir and Catalan plaer “pleasure”.^[9]

Wiktionary calls the kept /pl-/ irregular, since Castilian normally turned it into /ʎ/, spelt ⟨ll⟩.^[1] García de Diego's article gives the Castilian word as taken from Aragonese and Riojan.^[10] The Latin verb goes back to Proto-Italic *plak-ē- and Proto-Indo-European *pl(e)h₂k- (“to agree, be pleasant”) (de Vaan leaves open whether the laryngeal was h₂ or h₃), whose only clear cognates are Tocharian words such as plāki (“permission”).^[11]

Earliest recorded meaning

Corominas finds both the verb and the noun about 1140.^[5] In the Cantar de mio Cid, known from a 14th-century copy, the Cid accepts a request with „Plazme” “it pleases me”.^[3] The Auto de los Reyes Magos (c. 1180) asks „¿qué te plaze?” “what is your pleasure?”, and the Cortes of León of 1208, in a text without a later copy, use the noun for consent: „buen placer de todos los presentes”.^[3]

Semantic evolution

In Alfonso X's prose the noun meant contentment, a pleasant feeling, will or consent (con el plazer de dios) and diversion.^[12] Autoridades treats the verb as impersonal and calls it defective: it was used in few tenses and hardly in the infinitive.^[4] Covarrubias defines the noun as contentment or pastime.^[13] Autoridades gives the phrase a placer “with full pleasure, at ease”, and the Academy's 1884 edition the proverb A placeres acelerados, dones acrecentados “for good news brought quickly, bigger gifts”.^[4][14]

In the 19th century Baralt criticised mujer de placer for “prostitute” and hacer placer as Gallicisms.^[15] Román records that the Academy declared the verb conjugable in all its forms, like complacer, while preferring plugo and plegue in impersonal use.^[16] Today the verb is formal or literary, and the noun is the everyday word for pleasure.^[1][6]

Timeline

• c. 1140 – the Cantar de mio Cid: Plazme —dixo el Cid—.^[3][5]
• c. 1180 – the Auto de los Reyes Magos: ¿qué te plaze?^[3]
• 1208 – the Cortes of León use the noun for consent.^[3]
• 1220–1250 – first record of placentero.^[5]
• 1250–1279 – Alfonso X's Lapidario uses the noun for sensual pleasure.^[12]
• 1438 – first records of complacer and aplacible, a derivative of the old verb aplacer.^[5]
• 1513 – the first record from the Americas, in Tierra Firme: V.A. havrá mucho placer.^[17]
• 1564 – first record of the unrelated placer “sandbank”.^[18]
• 1611 – Covarrubias: el contento, o passatiempo.^[13]
• 1855 – Baralt condemns mujer de placer as a Gallicism.^[15]

Meanings

Verb

1. (intransitive, with an indirect object; formal or literary) To please, to be agreeable to someone: Nos place anunciar su visita.^[6][1]

Noun

1. pleasure, enjoyment of body or mind produced by something that pleases or is felt to be good.^[6][1]
2. amusement, entertainment: una vida dedicada a los placeres.^[6]
3. (obsolete) Will, consent, approval.^[6][12]

Word family

• placentero
• apacible
• pláceme
• aplacer

Related words

• complacer
• plácido
• displicente
• Latin placeō
• Portuguese prazer

Usage notes

Que me place is a formula of approval.^[6] The unrelated noun placer “sandbank”, also placel, is recorded from 1564 and comes from Catalan placer “underwater plain”, a derivative of the word for “square” (Spanish plaza); from “fishing ground” it came to mean a sandbank where water has left particles of gold, hence the mining sense.^[18][6][1]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i 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. placer
3. ^ a b c d e f Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. placer
4. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. s.v. placer
5. ^ a b c d e f Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. placer
6. ^ a b c d e f g h 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. placer
7. ^ 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. placer
8. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses, p. s.v. placer
9. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. s.v. placere
10. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 5077
11. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
12. ^ a b c 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. placer
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. 1, 1217
14. ^ Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 837
15. ^ a b Baralt, Rafael María (1855), Diccionario de galicismos, Madrid: Imprenta de J. Cruzado, p. 525
16. ^ Román, Manuel Antonio (1901–1918), Diccionario de chilenismos y de otras voces y locuciones viciosas, 5 vols., Santiago de Chile: Imprenta de San José, p. 335
17. ^ 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. placer
18. ^ a b Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. plaza