gregge

Forms

gregge m (plural greggi)^[1] Older forms include Old Italian grege, Old Italian gregie, Old Italian greggio and the northern Old Italian greço, Old Italian grezo and Old Italian grez.^[2] Beside the masculine there is a literary feminine greggia, and the word was also feminine in older Italian.^[3][4][5]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin grex (“flock, herd; crowd”), continued from the accusative gregem, a popular word.^[6][7][8][1] Devoto explains the double ⟨gg⟩ by a Vulgar Latin *gregja beside the Latin noun, which also accounts for the old form greggia.^[9] Sabatini–Coletti likewise sees the Latin accusative crossed with the old feminine form.^[10]

The Latin word lives on in Italy, Sardinia, Occitan, Spain and Portugal, and was borrowed into Welsh and Irish, but it has almost disappeared from French.^[5] The cognates are Spanish grey and Portuguese grei,^[7][1][11] with Campidanese Sardinian arrei “herd of large cattle” and Welsh gre.^[11] Körting notes that elsewhere in Romance it was replaced by other words, such as the descendants of Vulgar Latin *troppellus (French troupeau).^[12] Latin grex also gave the learned egregio and gregario.^[7]

De Vaan reconstructs Proto-Italic *gʷreg- and Proto-Indo-European *gʷreg- (“group, herd”), perhaps the unreduplicated form of a stem found reduplicated in Baltic and Greek.^[13] Nocentini and Devoto instead derive it from a root *ger- (“to gather”), seen in Ancient Greek ἀγείρω (ageírō, “to gather, assemble”) and in Latin gremium (“lap”) (Italian grembo).^[7][9] DELI calls the Greek cognates sure and the Sanskrit ones uncertain.^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLIO's first record is in the Lombard poem of Pietro da Bescapè (1274), in the sense of a herd of farm animals.^[2] DELI dates the form grege to the 13th century, in the Cassinese glosses and in Iacopone da Todi (before 1306), meaning a group of sheep or goats gathered under the care of a shepherd.^[6]

Semantic evolution

Already in Old Italian the word was used more widely: of a flock of birds, and figuratively of a group of people, a family line, and the community of Christian believers.^[2] Dante, in the De vulgari eloquentia, names greggia among the rough rustic words that a poet should avoid,^[6][14] yet in the Inferno he writes d'anime nude vidi molte gregge (“I saw many flocks of naked souls”).^[8][10]

The form gregge appears in Arrigo Simintendi's translation of Ovid in 1333.^[6] The contemptuous sense of a servile and passive mass of people is recorded from Tommaso Garzoni in 1585.^[6] Poets spoke of the gregge lanuto (sheep) and the gregge barbato (goats), and Ariosto of the marin gregge, the creatures of the sea.^[3][15][16] In medicine, immunità di gregge is herd immunity.^[3]

Timeline

• 13th century – Grege appears in the Cassinese glosses.^[6]
• 1274 – Pietro da Bescapè uses the word in a Lombard poem.^[2][7]
• Before 1306 – Iacopone da Todi writes grege.^[6]
• 1300–1313 – Dante discusses greggia in the De vulgari eloquentia.^[6]
• 1333 – The form gregge is used by Arrigo Simintendi.^[6]
• 1585 – Tommaso Garzoni uses the word for a servile, passive crowd.^[6]

Meanings

Noun

1. A flock of sheep or goats kept together under the care of a shepherd: Al tramonto il gregge torna all'ovile.^[8][3][10]
2. By extension, a herd of domestic or wild animals.^[8][15]
3. (figurative) A great number of people, a multitude.^[8][10][4]
4. (figurative, derogatory) A mass of people who lack initiative and independence and passively accept being led.^[8][3][10]
5. (figurative, religion) The faithful entrusted to the spiritual care of a bishop or other church authority.^[8][3][4]

Word family

• aggreggiare

Related words

• greggia
• egregio
• gregario
• grembo
• Latin grex

Usage notes

The plural is usually feminine, le greggi, less often masculine i greggi.^[3][4] In literary use there is also a feminine plural le gregge.^[3][4][15] Uscire dal gregge means to rise above the crowd, to stand out from the mass.^[3][15][4] A cane da gregge is a sheepdog.^[8]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
4. ^ a b c d e f Vocabolario della lingua italiana Treccani (2011), Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana
5. ^ a b Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 1868
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
7. ^ a b c d e Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
8. ^ a b c d e f g h De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
9. ^ a b Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier, p. 209
10. ^ a b c d e Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
11. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
12. ^ Körting, Gustav (1907), Lateinisch-romanisches Wörterbuch: etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Hauptsprachen, 3rd ed., Paderborn: Schöningh
13. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
14. ^ Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
15. ^ a b c d Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
16. ^ Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)