ossoso

Forms

ossoso (feminine ossosa, masculine plural ossosi, feminine plural ossose)^[1]

Etymology

It is from Italian osso + -oso in the Italian dictionaries, which date it to the 14th century.^[2][3][4] Wiktionary instead traces it to Late Latin ossuōsus, an adjective made from Latin os (“bone”) with the ending of words such as virtuōsus.^[1] Tommaseo already noted the Latin adjective in Vegetius.^[5]

Körting groups the Italian word under Latin oss(u)ōsus “bony” with Romanian osos, Old Occitan ossos, French osseux, Spanish huesoso and Portuguese ossuoso.^[6]

The Latin noun os goes back to a Proto-Indo-European word for “bone”, Proto-Indo-European *h₃ésth₁, and is related to Ancient Greek ὀστέον (ostéon) and Sanskrit अस्थि (asthi).^[7][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The oldest quotations in the historical dictionaries come from medieval treatises on the diseases of horses: il luogo ossoso suole fistolare “the bony place tends to form a fistula”, and Dino da Firenze's remark that the trouble arises “especially in bony places and in the joints”.^[8][5] In these texts the word means “made of bone, full of bone”.^[9]

Semantic evolution

Later scientific prose kept the sense “of bone”: Vallisneri wrote of the hard and bony parts of the body that may turn to stone, and Gioia of the bony armour of the skull.^[9] A second sense, “supported by bones, with prominent bones”, the same as ossuto, appears in Leopardi's lines on strange beasts “of a kind more bony and hard than any other”.^[9][2]

Modern dictionaries mark the first sense as obsolete and the second as literary.^[4][3]

Timeline

• 1300s – Ossoso is first recorded.^[2][3][4]

Meanings

Adjective

1. (obsolete) Of bone, bony in substance; the same as osseo: una parte ossosa del corpo.^[4][2][9]
2. (literary) bony, with prominent bones; the same as ossuto.^[3][4][2][1]

Related words

• osso
• osseo
• ossuto
• Latin os

References

1. ^ a b c d 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 Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
4. ^ a b c d e Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
5. ^ a b Tommaseo, Niccolò; Bellini, Bernardo (1861–1879), Dizionario della lingua italiana, 4 vols., Torino: UTET
6. ^ Körting, Gustav (1907), Lateinisch-romanisches Wörterbuch: etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Hauptsprachen, 3rd ed., Paderborn: Schöningh
7. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
9. ^ 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, p. 12, 238