Etymologically
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avius

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Pronunciation

  • Classical: [ˈaː.wi.ʊs][1]
  • Ecclesiastical: [ˈaː.vi.us][1]

Forms

āvius (feminine āvia, neuter āvium); first/second-declension adjective[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin ab- (“away from”) + via (“way, road”) + -us, “away from the road”.[2][3][1] Lewis & Short contrast it with dēvius, leading away from the right way, and invius, having no way at all,[4] and a fragment of Suetonius defines it as winding.[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLL finds it from Plautus on, though not in Cicero.[3] In the Aulularia a grove of Silvanus outside the wall is lonely and unfrequented.[2]

Semantic evolution

It is used of places without roads, trackless and unvisited, and with a dative inaccessible, as Livy's places beyond the reach of supplies.[2] It also means out of the way, remote, and predicatively far off, as Virgil's warrior hiding himself far off in the mountains.[2][4] A third sense is going astray: Lucretius uses it of Phaethon carried off course, and of a person who strays far from true reasoning.[2] It is mostly a word of the poets and historians.[4]

Timeline

  • c. 250–184 BC – Plautus of an unfrequented grove.[2][5]
  • 96–55 BC – Lucretius of going astray.[2][5]
  • 70–19 BC – Virgil of a warrior hiding far off.[2][5]
  • 59 BC–17 AD – Livy of places out of reach of supplies.[2][5]

Meanings

Adjective

  1. Without roads, trackless, unfrequented; with a dative, inaccessible.[2][4][1]
  2. Out of the way, remote; at a distance, far off.[2][4][1]
  3. Going astray, off course; departing from the right way of thinking.[2][4][1]

Word family

  • āvium

Usage notes

A noun avius, “grandfather”, made as a masculine to avia “grandmother”, appears in some inscriptions of the Empire and again in texts from 780 on.[1] The TLL refers it to avus.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m 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. ^ a b c d e f Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  5. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de