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damma

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Etymology and origin of the Latin word damma

Confidence
Uncertain
First attested
70–19 BC, Virgil

Forms

damma f or m (genitive dammae); first declension[1] It is also spelled dāma.[2][3][4] It is usually feminine, but sometimes masculine in poetry.[2][3]

Etymology

The origin is uncertain.[5][6] The TLL takes it for a foreign word and compares Old Irish dam (“ox”) and Welsh dafad (“sheep”);[5] the OLD gives the same comparison,[2] and Köbler suggests a borrowing from Celtic.[6] Lewis & Short and Wiktionary instead connect it with domō (“to tame”) and Proto-Indo-European *demh₂- (“to domesticate, tame”).[3][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Köbler dates it from Virgil,[6] who uses it in the Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid.[3]

Semantic evolution

It is the general name for smaller animals of the deer family, the fallow deer, roe, gazelle, antelope or chamois.[2][3] Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Seneca use it in poetry,[3] and Pliny the Elder in his natural history.[3] Its gender varies: Virgil and Statius make it masculine, and Lewis & Short refer to Quintilian for this.[3][5] As meat it is venison: Juvenal writes of rich men for whom neither turbot nor venison has any taste.[2][3] In Medieval Latin it is written dāma.[4]

Timeline

  • 70–19 BC – Virgil of deer, sometimes as a masculine.[3][6]
  • c. 35–95/96 AD – Quintilian on its gender.[3]
  • c. 67–c. 127 AD – Juvenal of venison.[2][3]

Meanings

Noun

  1. A deer of the smaller kinds: a fallow deer, roe, gazelle, antelope or chamois.[2][3][1]
  2. (as food) Venison.[2][3]

Word family

  • dammula

References

  1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  4. ^ a b Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill
  5. ^ a b c Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
  6. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
Cite this entry

“Damma.” Etymologically, 20 Oct. 2026, etymologically.com/la/damma. Accessed 20 Oct. 2026.

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