danno

Forms

danno m (plural danni)^[1] Old Italian forms include dagno, dampno, damno and dano.^[2] The forms with /ɲ/ come from the plural dagni, as agni beside anno.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin damnum (“loss, damage; expense; fine”).^{[4][5][6][1][7]} The Latin cluster ⟨-mn-⟩ became ⟨-nn-⟩ in the popular word, while learned spellings such as damno and dampno kept it.^[3] DELI and the LEI note that the derivatives dannare, dannazione and dannoso reached Italian by the learned route.^[4][3]

The Latin noun survives in all the Romance languages: Old French dam, Old Occitan dan, Catalan dany, Spanish daño, Portuguese dano, Sardinian dannu, Romanian daună, Friulian dan, and it was borrowed into Basque as damu.^[5][3][7] Old French built on it damage, later dommage, which came into Old Italian as dalmaggio and dannaggio.^[3][8]

DELI calls the origin of the Latin word uncertain.^[4] De Vaan reconstructs Proto-Italic *dapnom and Proto-Indo-European *dh₂pnóm (“expense, investment”), and Wiktionary derives this from Proto-Indo-European *deh₂p- (“to sacrifice”), the root of daps (“sacrificial meal”).^[9][1] Nocentini compares Ancient Greek δάπτω (dáptō, “to devour”), Ancient Greek δαπάνη (dapánē, “expense”) and Old Norse tafn (“sacrificial animal”); following Devoto, the word first meant an atoning offering of food, and when its sacred value faded only the economic sense of cost remained.^[5][10]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLIO's first record is the Venetian Proverbia que dicuntur of the late 12th century, and its first sense is an economic loss suffered by a person or a trading company.^[2] DELI dates the word to the beginning of the 13th century, from Rinaldo d'Aquino: “I do not count it as harm to love so high a flower” (E non mi tegno a danno / amare sì alta fiore).^[4][11]

Semantic evolution

Old Italian used the word for financial loss, for the dead and the destruction of war, for harm to health, for the devastation of land by weather, men or beasts, and for injury to a city or a people.^[2] It also meant moral injury, grief or shame, and in religious language eternal punishment: danno eterno is damnation.^[2][6] Boccaccio left Calandrino col danno e colle beffe, both robbed and mocked, a phrase still in use.^[12][13]

The law gave the word its modern technical senses: the injury caused by an unlawful act, and in the plural the damages paid for it.^[6][14] The danno biologico, injury to a person's physical health, entered the dictionaries in the 1980s, and danno collaterale (1990) is a calque of English collateral damage.^[11] In medicine it names a lesion of an organ.^[6][15] In German, Damno has been a banking term for a discount on a loan since about 1600.^[16]

Timeline

• Late 12th century – The Venetian Proverbia que dicuntur is the first record.^[2]
• Early 13th century – Rinaldo d'Aquino uses danno in a love poem.^[4]
• Before 1250 – Giacomo da Lentini uses danneggiare “to harm”.^[4]
• Before 1294 – Dannoso “harmful” appears in Brunetto Latini.^[4]
• About 1600 – German Damno is recorded as a banking term.^[16]
• 1990 – Danno collaterale appears in the press, after English collateral damage.^[11]

Meanings

Noun

1. damage, harm: the bad effect that an event or action has on people, things or abstract entities: La grandine ha fatto gravi danni ai vigneti.^[6][12][13]
2. (law) Injury to someone's rights or interests caused by another's unlawful act.^[6][12][14]
3. In the plural, damages: the sum paid in compensation: Ha fatto causa al vicino per ottenere i danni.^[6][13][17]
4. (medicine) A lesion or impairment of an organ or part of the body: danno renale.^[6][14][15]
5. (literary) Pain, grief, danno eterno, damnation.^[6][13][17]

Word family

• danneggiare
• dannare
• dannato
• dannazione
• danneggiamento
• danneggiato
• dannoso

Related words

• dannaggio
• dannevole
• condannare
• Latin damnum

Usage notes

A danno di or ai danni di means “to the detriment of”, fare danni “to break things, cause trouble”, and mio danno, tuo danno “so much the worse for me, for you”.^[6][12][13] Il danno e la beffa, loss and mockery together, is a common phrase.^[6][17]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c d e Pfister, Max; Schweickard, Wolfgang; Prifti, Elton (eds.) (1979–), Lessico Etimologico Italiano, Wiesbaden: Reichert; online at lei-digitale.it, p. 19, 63
4. ^ a b c d e f g Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
5. ^ a b c Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
7. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
8. ^ Prati, Angelico (1951), Vocabolario etimologico italiano, Milano: Garzanti, p. 362
9. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
10. ^ Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier
11. ^ a b c Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
12. ^ a b c d Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
13. ^ a b c d e Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
14. ^ a b c Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
15. ^ a b Vocabolario della lingua italiana Treccani (2011), Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana
16. ^ a b Stammerjohann, Harro, et al. (2008), Dizionario di italianismi in francese, inglese, tedesco, Firenze: Accademia della Crusca; online at difit.italianisticaonline.it
17. ^ a b c Gabrielli, Aldo (2020), Grande dizionario italiano, digital ed., Milano: Hoepli