cometes

Forms

comētēs m (genitive comētae); first declension^[1] Prudentius has a nominative comēta.^[2][3] The Octavia ascribed to Seneca has an accusative comētam.^[4][2]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Ancient Greek κομήτης (komḗtēs, “long-haired; comet”),^[4][5][1][6] from κομάω (komáō, “to have long hair”) and ultimately κόμη (kómē, “hair”),^[1][7] the noun that Latin also borrowed as coma.^[1] The comet was the “long-haired” star because its tail looks like streaming hair.^[7]

Earliest recorded meaning

Apart from one corrupt passage of Accius, the TLL records it from Cicero on,^[3] for a comet in the De natura deorum and the De divinatione.^[2][6]

Semantic evolution

It names a luminous body in the sky with a tail, a comet or meteor.^[4][2] It was often taken as a sign of disaster: Virgil says dread comets never blazed so often, and Tibullus calls a comet a sign of war;^[4] Lucan speaks of the comet that overturns kingdoms.^[4] In hexameter verse it stands only at the end of the line.^[3] Seneca devotes the seventh book of his Natural Questions to comets, using the word more than eighty times.^[3]

Pliny the Elder notes that the Greeks call these stars comētae and the Romans crīnītae, “hairy ones”.^[3] Servius and a scholiast on Juvenal have an accusative comētem, and Gregory of Tours writes comitis.^[3][2] Through Old French comete, the Latin word gave English comet about 1200.^[7]

Timeline

• 81–43 BC – Cicero uses it for a comet.^[3][2][6]
• 70–19 BC – Virgil treats comets as portents.^[4][6]
• 4 BC–65 AD – Seneca writes a whole book on comets.^[3][6]
• 23/24–79 AD – Pliny the Elder gives crīnītae as the Latin name.^[3][6]
• 348/49–c. 413 AD – Prudentius uses the form comēta.^[2][6]
• c. 1200 – English takes comet from Old French.^[7]

Meanings

Noun

1. A comet or meteor.^[4][2]
2. A comet as a portent, especially of a great disaster.^[4]

Related words

• English comet

Usage notes

Servius explains that the comet is properly so called because it is surrounded by hair on either side.^[3] Comētēs is also a Greek personal name, borne in Ovid by one of the Lapiths.^[2]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ a b c d e f g h Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
5. ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
6. ^ a b c d e f g Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
7. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com