aquor

Forms

aquor (present infinitive aquārī, perfect active aquātus sum); first conjugation, deponent^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin aqua (“water”) + -or, a verb made from the noun.^[2][3][1] De Vaan traces aqua to Proto-Italic *akwā- (“water”), with a Germanic cognate in Old High German aha (“water”), and thinks the shared Italic and Germanic word may be a loan from a non-Indo-European language.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is a military term in Caesar's Civil War, of soldiers who could fetch water only with difficulty,^[5][3] and Sallust uses it of a common soldier leaving camp to get water.^[5]

Semantic evolution

It stayed mostly a soldiers' word for fetching drinking water.^[2][5] Virgil, Pliny the Elder and Palladius use it of bees getting water,^[5] and Pliny of soil that likes to be watered for a long time, which Lewis & Short take as the deponent, not as a true passive.^[5]

Timeline

• c. 50 BC – Caesar, of soldiers fetching water.^[5][3][6]
• 86–34 BC – Sallust, of a soldier going out of camp for water.^[5][6]
• 70–19 BC – Virgil, of bees.^[5][6]
• 23/24–79 AD – Pliny the Elder, of watered soil.^[5][6]

Meanings

Verb

1. (military) To fetch water for drinking.^[2][5][1]
2. Of bees, to get water.^[5]
3. Of the earth, to be watered.^[5][1]

Word family

• aquātiō
• aquātor
• inaquo
• adaquō

Related words

• aqua
• aquārius

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de