commeo

Forms

commeō (present infinitive commeāre, perfect active commeāvī, supine commeātum); first conjugation^[1] It is also spelled conmeō.^[2]

Etymology

It is from Latin con- + meō (“to go, pass”).^[3][1][4] De Vaan traces meō to Proto-Italic *mejo- and, through a shift from “change” to “change places” and “go past”, to Proto-Indo-European *h₂mei-o- (“to exchange”), comparing Ancient Greek ἀμείβω (ameíbō, “to exchange, change”).^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

Plautus has it first: in the Rudens it would be fitter for a man to go to the hangman than to Venus, and in the Curculio missiles fly thick at someone.^[3][5]

Semantic evolution

It is to come and go regularly, to travel or pass to and fro: Caesar wants a route on which even single men could pass safely, and Tacitus has soldiers travelling from the East on leave.^[3] Festus explains it as going back and forth, whence commeātus, leave of absence.^[2] Things travel too: letters and goods, the blood in the veins in the Aetna, and the stars that move from rising to setting in Cicero.^[3] Pliny the Elder says that some trees will not travel to foreign lands, and Seneca uses it of passages that communicate with each other.^[3] Cicero also has elements passing from one state into another.^[3]

Timeline

• c. 250–184 BC – Plautus of going somewhere and of missiles coming thick.^[3][6]
• 81–43 BC – Cicero of the motion of the stars.^[3][6]
• c. 50 BC – Caesar of travelling safely.^[3][6]
• 98–115 AD – Tacitus of soldiers travelling on leave.^[3][6]

Meanings

Verb

1. To come and go, go regularly, travel; to visit, frequent.^[3][2][1]
2. Of goods, letters or natural things, to travel, be conveyed; to pass, flow.^[3]
3. Of plants, to bear being moved to another place.^[3]
4. To communicate, be connected.^[3]
5. To pass from one state to another.^[3]

Word family

• commeabilis
• commeātor
• commeātus
• commētō

Related words

• meō
• remeō

References

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