potare

Forms

potare (first-person singular present póto, first-person singular past historic potài, past participle potàto, auxiliary avére)^[1] Old Italian also had northern forms with ⟨d⟩, such as Old Italian podar and Old Italian podare.^[2] DEI records podare in Bembo in the 16th century.^[3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin putō (“to clean; to prune”), an agricultural verb that also came to mean “to reckon, think”.^[4][5][6][1] DELI quotes the observation that it is one of the Latin words with a concrete and an abstract sense of which only the concrete one lived on in speech, here as the Italian verb.^[4] The same verb gave Dalmatian potuor, Logudorese pudare, Occitan podar, Catalan podar, Spanish podar and Portuguese podar.^[7][5] DEI adds that the Latin word passed into the German dialects.^[3]

De Vaan takes the adjective putus (“pure, genuine”) as the base of the family and the verb as derived from it, with the first meaning “to cut off unwanted branches”, from Proto-Italic *puto- (“cut off, clean”) and Proto-Indo-European *pHu-tó-.^[8] Nocentini compares Lithuanian pjáuti (“to cut”) and links the verb to paviō (“to beat”), with a shift from “strike” to “cut”.^[5][8] The abstract sense of the Latin verb survives in the learned putativo, reputare and computare.^[5][9]

Earliest recorded meaning

DELI's first record is a Florentine account of 1295 in the Nuovi testi fiorentini: a labourer paid for the vineyard che vangoe e potoe e legoe (which he dug, pruned and tied).^[4][10] The sense was already the agricultural one: cutting back branches so that the plant takes a given shape and bears better fruit.^[4][2]

Semantic evolution

In Old Italian the verb was used of vines and fruit trees, and in figurative contexts of purging the soul of sin or of God testing the faithful with trials, and of laying waste a territory.^[2] Fra Giordano compared the cleaning of trees by potandogli with the removal of what is superfluous.^[10]

By extension the verb came to mean “to cut off” in general: Luigi Pulci in 1483 used it of cutting off hands in battle, and Vincenzo Monti and Giusti later used it for amputating and for castrating.^[4][11][12] The figurative sense of cutting the superfluous parts out of a text, as in potare un articolo, is the modern extended use.^[6][12] Derivatives followed early: potatura is recorded in 1293 and potatore in the Crescenzi translation, and the tool potatoio goes back to Istrian Medieval Latin podadora of the 14th century.^[4]

Timeline

• 1293 – The noun potatura appears in a Florentine document.^[4]
• 1295 – Potare is recorded in Florentine accounts.^[4]
• c. 1350 – Potatore appears in the Italian translation of Pietro de' Crescenzi.^[4]
• 1446 – Podadora, a pruning tool, is recorded at Pola.^[4]
• 1483 – Luigi Pulci uses potare for “to cut” in general.^[4]
• 1618 – Potatoio appears in Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger.^[4]

Meanings

Verb

1. To prune: to cut back branches, shoots or roots of a plant to remove old or diseased parts, to help it grow or to give it a shape; also used without an object: Abbiamo potato le viti a marzo.^[6][13][14]
2. (literary) To cut off, amputate; also to castrate.^[6][13][12]
3. (figurative) To shorten a text or a speech by removing what is superfluous: Il redattore ha potato il saggio di dieci pagine.^[6][14][13]

Word family

• potatoio
• potatore
• potatura
• potatrice
• ripotare

Related words

• putativo
• reputare
• computare
• amputare
• Latin putō

Usage notes

Potare “to prune” has a close vowel (póto); a separate literary and archaic potare “to drink” (pòto) is a learned borrowing from Latin pōtō (“to drink”), used by Iacopone da Todi in the 13th century (nascen’ el vino per potare).^{[13][12][10][6]}

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 3041
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l 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 d Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
6. ^ a b c d e f De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
7. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
8. ^ 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
9. ^ Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier
10. ^ a b c Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
11. ^ Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
12. ^ a b c d Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)
13. ^ 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
14. ^ a b Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse