sieso

Forms

sieso m (plural siesos)^[1] Dialect forms include sielso in Santander, Burgos and Ávila and sieuso in Segovia and León.^[2] Seso, the form Corominas calls Mozarabic, names the curved iron that holds a pot steady on the hearth in Toledo.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin sessus (“the act of sitting; seat”) and properly meant “the buttocks, the seat”.^[3][4][1] The Latin noun is formed from sedeō (“to sit”) with an action-noun suffix; it is found only once in Latin texts, in Apuleius.^[5][1]

The same word is Portuguese sesso “buttocks”, Galician cenzo, Catalan ses, Old French ses and Italian sesso “anus”.^[2][6][7] The REW leaves out Romanian șes (“plain”), which it takes from Albanian.^[6] The Latin verb goes back to Proto-Indo-European *sed-eh₁- (“to be seated”).^[8]

The VOX dictionary splits the anatomical noun from the adjective “unpleasant”, deriving the adjective from the Latin noun through a shift to a part of the body near the buttocks and calling the noun of uncertain origin; the DLE and Moliner treat them as one word.^[9][4][10]

Earliest recorded meaning

DEMel's first record is in the appendix to Pero López de Ayala's Libro de la caza de las aves (1386), in Cummins's edition.^[11][12] Fifteenth-century surgical treatises use it often: the Suma de la flor de cirugía and a treatise on general pathology are the first texts with the word in the HSMS archive.^[13] The DCECH cites Alfonso de Palencia (1490), who explains Latin colus as the end of the intestine, “and it means the same as siesso”.^[3]

Semantic evolution

Nebrija in about 1495 marked the word with salvo onor “saving your honour”, and Covarrubias in 1611 explained it from Latin sedendo and called asentaderas the polite name for the buttocks.^[12][14] The Academy defined it in 1817 as the hind part of the body through which the excrement passes.^[15] From 1884 it defined it as the lower part of the rectum including the anus, now with the etymology from sessus.^[16] The figurative adjective, of a disagreeable, surly person, is colloquial and Spanish, recorded for Andalusia by Alcalá Venceslada.^[4][10][17] In Peru the noun names a woman's large buttocks and the adjective once meant “shameless”, and in the Dominican Republic it means the vulva.^[18][19]

Timeline

• 1386 – the first record in DEMel, in the appendix of López de Ayala's book on falconry.^[11]
• 1490 – Alfonso de Palencia uses it to gloss Latin colus.^[3]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives Latin sedes as its equivalent.^[12]
• 1560 – the first record from the Americas, in Yucatán.^[20]
• 1611 – Covarrubias derives it from Latin sedendo.^[14]
• 1884 – the Academy's dictionary gives the etymology from sessus.^[16]

Meanings

Noun

1. (anatomy) The anus with the lower part of the rectum.^[4][1]
2. (Peru) A woman's large buttocks.^[18]

Adjective

1. (Spain, colloquial) Of a person: disagreeable, unfriendly or surly; also used as a noun: No seas tan sieso y saluda.^[4][10]

Related words

• sentar
• asiento
• Latin sessus
• Portuguese sesso

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954), p. 6100
3. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 5, 205
4. ^ a b c d e 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. sieso
5. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 7882
7. ^ Alcover, Antoni M.; Moll, Francesc de B. (1930–1962), Diccionari català-valencià-balear, 10 vols., Palma de Mallorca: Moll, p. s.v. ses
8. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
9. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. sieso
10. ^ a b c Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. sieso
11. ^ a b Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. sieso
12. ^ a b c 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. sieso
13. ^ Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (2026), Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA): semi-paleographic transcriptions of Old Spanish texts, ed. Francisco Gago Jover et al., https://www.hispanicseminary.org, p. s.v. sieso
14. ^ 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. 1298
15. ^ Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real, p. 801
16. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 975
17. ^ Alcalá Venceslada, Antonio (1951), Vocabulario andaluz, Madrid: Real Academia Española, p. 576
18. ^ 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. sieso
19. ^ Academia Dominicana de la Lengua; Instituto Guzmán Ariza de Lexicografía (2024), Diccionario del español dominicano, 2nd ed., online at https://ded.igalex.org, p. s.v. sieso
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. sienso