Etymologically
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cometes

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Pronunciation

  • Classical: [kɔˈmeː.teːs][1]
  • Ecclesiastical: [koˈmɛː.tes][1]

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]

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