ordo

Forms

ordo (feminine orda, masculine plural ordi, feminine plural orde)^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin horridus (“bristling; rough, frightful”).^{[2][3][4][5][1]} The learned doublet of the same Latin word is orrido.^[1][3]

Meyer-Lübke explained the vowel of the Tuscan word as taken from lordo, sporco and sordo.^[5] Körting notes that the word has a closed /o/, which led Gröber to separate it from the French and Provençal words, but he himself preferred to explain the form by assimilation to lordo.^[6] The GDLI and Wiktionary also allow for the influence of that word.^[4][1]

The same Latin adjective gave Old French ort, feminine orde, with the noun ordure, still French ordure today, and Old Occitan ort.^[6] Meyer-Lübke adds Aretine ordio (“rough, bad”) and an Old Lombard orrio.^[5] The Latin adjective comes from horreō (“to bristle, shudder”) with the suffix -idus.^[7][1] De Vaan traces the verb to Proto-Italic *χors-ē- (“to be stiff”) and further to Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰr̥s-éh₁- (“to be stiff, surprised”).^[8]

Earliest recorded meaning

GRADIT dates the adjective to the 13th century.^[2] Among the GDLI's earliest quotations is the Proverbia super natura feminarum, where a dyed colour is called una color bruta, orda e vilana (“an ugly colour, filthy and base”), in the literal sense “dirty, foul”.^[4]

Semantic evolution

In Old Italian the adjective meant “dirty, unwashed”: a vernacular Seneca warns against making oneself conspicuous by being ordo, mal pettinato (“dirty, badly combed”).^[4] It was soon used of the mind: Guittone writes of gli ordi di cuore (“the foul of heart”), a translation of the Lord's Prayer asks the reader to put away all thoughts carnali e ordi e mondani (“carnal, foul and worldly”), and the Proverbia call a joke orda, that is, unseemly.^[4][9]

It could also mean “ugly, deformed”: Giovanni Villani tells of a woman who gave birth to la più orda e orribile creatura (“the foulest and most horrible creature”).^[4][9] Tommaseo already marked the word as obsolete and compared French ordure.^[9] Modern dictionaries list it only as an obsolete or rare word.^[2][3][1]

Timeline

• 1200s – GRADIT's date for the first record of the adjective.^[2]
• Before 1348 – The date Zingarelli gives for the word.^[3]
• 1861 – Tommaseo–Bellini marks it as obsolete.^[9]

Meanings

Adjective

1. (obsolete) filthy, dirty, foul.^[4][9][1]
2. (obsolete, figurative) corrupt in mind, sinful; also unseemly, improper.^[4][1]
3. (obsolete) ugly, horrible, deformed.^[2][3][4][1]

Word family

• ordura

Related words

• orrido
• lordo
• Latin horridus

Usage notes

Tommaseo notes that the adjective was pronounced with a closed /o/, like lordo.^[9]

Old Italian also had a rare learned noun ordo “order”, a synonym of ordine taken from Latin ōrdō, which the GDLI quotes from the verse of Nuccoli and Cicerchia.^[4][1]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
3. ^ a b c d e Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
5. ^ a b c Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
6. ^ a b Körting, Gustav (1907), Lateinisch-romanisches Wörterbuch: etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Hauptsprachen, 3rd ed., Paderborn: Schöningh
7. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
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. ^ a b c d e f Tommaseo, Niccolò; Bellini, Bernardo (1861–1879), Dizionario della lingua italiana, 4 vols., Torino: UTET