inverno

Forms

inverno m (plural inverni, pejorative invernàccio)^[1] Old Italian texts have many forms, among them Old Italian enverno, Old Italian iverno, Old Italian yverno, Old Italian invernu and the shortened Old Italian verno.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Late Latin hībernum (“winter”), a noun recorded in Late Latin from Minucius Felix in the 2nd century AD, made from the phrase hībernum tempus (“winter season”).^[3][4][1] DEI names Tertullian and Caelius Aurelianus as early users of the noun.^[5] The neuter plural hiberna was already used as a noun in Virgil's Aeneid.^[3] The adjective Latin hībernus (“of winter”) took the place of the classical noun hiems (“winter”) in the passage from Latin to Romance.^[4][1]

The ⟨-n-⟩ comes from a reanalysis of the word as the preposition in followed by verno, which DELI thinks may already have happened in spoken Latin, as Vulgar Latin *invernum.^[3][4][6][1] Devoto describes it in the same way: the word was split as ⟨i(n)-verno⟩ rather than ⟨iv-erno⟩.^[7] The same ⟨n⟩ is found in Vegliote, Ladin, the southern Italian dialects and modern Spanish and Portuguese, but is missing in most of Sardinian.^[5] In the dialects the form with ⟨in-⟩ is mainly northern and central, the form without it mainly southern.^[8]

The word is pan-Romance: French hiver, Occitan ivern, Catalan ivern, Spanish invierno, Portuguese inverno, Sardinian ierru and Romanian iarnă.^[4][8] Further forms are Dalmatian inviarno and Friulian inviorn.^[8]

The Latin adjective goes back to Proto-Italic *heimrinos, from the same root as the noun for winter.^[4][1][9] It matches Ancient Greek χειμερινός (kheimerinós, “wintry”), and the root is Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰéyōm (“winter”).^{[1][10][7][9]}

Earliest recorded meaning

DELI dates the first record to the 12th century, in Ugo di Perso, and the TLIO's first text is the Venetian Proverbia que dicuntur.^[3][2] The sense was already the cold season between autumn and spring.^[2][11] Ugo di Perso complains of having a woman far away in winter (d'inverno aver liutan la femna).^[11]

Semantic evolution

Old Italian used the word for spending the winter (fare l'inverno), for winter clothes (panni di inverno), for a whole year, and figuratively for old age, lack of warmth or a time of hardship; it also named the regions between the tropics and the poles.^[2] Dante uses inverno only three times, against the more frequent verno:^[3] Quale ne l'arzanà de' Viniziani / bolle l'inverno la tenace pece (“As in the arsenal of the Venetians the sticky pitch boils in winter”).^[11][12] In older texts, and in Ariosto, the word could also mean a storm, a sense that Latin hiems had too.^[13]

In the 19th century Tommaseo found inverno to be the common word all over Italy, with verno alive in popular Tuscan and in writing.^[12] Derivatives followed: invernata, the length of a winter, appears in the 14th century, and invernale “wintry” in 1562.^[3]

Timeline

• 12th century – Ugo di Perso uses inverno.^[3][11]
• 1300–1321 – Dante prefers verno and uses inverno three times.^[3]
• 14th century – Invernata “a winter's length” appears in a translation of Livy.^[3]
• 1562 – Invernale is recorded in F. Venuti;^[3] Florio has it in 1598.^[3]

Meanings

Noun

1. winter, the coldest season of the year, between autumn and spring; in the northern hemisphere from the solstice of 21 or 22 December to the equinox of 21 March: Quest'anno l'inverno è stato breve.^{[6][14][15][16]}
2. (locution) da inverno: for winter, wintry: una giacca da inverno.^[14][15]

Word family

• invernale
• invernata
• verno
• svernare
• vernino
• invernare

Related words

• iemale
• Latin hiems
• French hiver

Usage notes

Verno is the literary and popular Tuscan form.^[17][12] Fixed phrases include giardino d'inverno (a glazed conservatory), quartieri d'inverno (winter quarters of troops) and Palazzo d'inverno, the Winter Palace of Saint Petersburg.^[17][15][18]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g 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 j k Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
4. ^ a b c d e Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
5. ^ a b Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 2082
6. ^ a b De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
7. ^ a b Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier
8. ^ a b c Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
9. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
10. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ a b c d 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 Tommaseo, Niccolò; Bellini, Bernardo (1861–1879), Dizionario della lingua italiana, 4 vols., Torino: UTET
13. ^ Prati, Angelico (1951), Vocabolario etimologico italiano, Milano: Garzanti, p. 563
14. ^ a b Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
15. ^ a b c Vocabolario della lingua italiana Treccani (2011), Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana
16. ^ Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
17. ^ a b Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
18. ^ Gabrielli, Aldo (2020), Grande dizionario italiano, digital ed., Milano: Hoepli