suggello

Forms

suggello m (plural suggelli)^[1] Old forms include Old Italian sugiello, Old Italian sugello, Old Italian suggiello and Old Italian suggiglio.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is the popular outcome, inherited from Latin sigillum (“small figure; seal”), whose learned doublet is sigillo.^[3][4][1][5] Wiktionary sets up Vulgar Latin *sūgillum in between.^[1] The vowel and the ending are explained in different ways: DEI sees an early replacement of the Latin diminutive ending by -ello, and GRADIT an influence of that suffix, while Devoto and Devoto–Oli think the first syllable was taken as the prefix sub-, so that the old diminutive was felt to be the root.^[6][7][8][9] The form with ⟨sug-⟩ must be old, since it is also found in Old Italian suello, an old Venetian form, and in Romanian sugel (“whitlow”).^[6][10]

The Latin word continues across the Romance languages: French sceau, Occitan sael, Catalan segell, Spanish sello, Portuguese selo and Sardinian siddu (“old coin”).^[4][10] The Latin word is a diminutive of signum (“sign, mark”).^[11][1][5]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is sugiello in a Sienese letter of 1283, in the sense “seal”.^[3][4][7] Bono Giamboni compares the shaping of character by example with the way “wax receives the shape of the seal”.^[2]

Semantic evolution

In Old Italian the suggello was the engraved seal of a ruler, a commune or a private person, used to authenticate and close documents;^[2] Giovanni Villani writes of the arms of France and England halved on an emblem and seal.^[2] Dante wrote sì come cera da suggello / che la figura impressa non trasmuta (“as wax under the seal, which does not change the figure pressed into it”), and he also has the figurative “testimony, confirmation”: e questo sia suggel ch'ogn'omo sganni (“and let this be a seal that undeceives every man”).^[3][12]

Sigillo became the ordinary word for the object, and suggello passed from a popular to a literary form.^[12] Today it lives mainly in the figurative sense, above all in the phrase a suggello di, “as a final confirmation of”.^[12][9] The verb suggellare is also found in Dante, before 1321.^[3]

Timeline

• 1283 – Sugiello “seal” appears in a Sienese letter.^[3]
• Before 1321 – Dante uses suggello for a confirming sign, and the verb suggellare.^[3]

Meanings

Noun

1. (literary) A seal, the engraved stamp or the impression it leaves: il suggello del re.^{[7][9][5][13]}
2. (figurative) A gesture, word or act that gives definitive confirmation to an agreement or promise;^{[7][9][5][14]} a suggello di: as a seal on: Brindarono a suggello dell'accordo.^{[7][9][5][14]}

Word family

• suggellare

Related words

• sigillo
• segno
• Latin sigillum

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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. 20, 507
3. ^ a b c d e f g 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 Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
5. ^ a b c d e Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
6. ^ a b Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 3673
7. ^ a b c d e De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
8. ^ Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier
9. ^ a b c d e Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
10. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
11. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
12. ^ a b c Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)
13. ^ Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
14. ^ a b Vocabolario della lingua italiana Treccani (2011), Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana