delinquentia

Forms

dēlinquentia f (genitive dēlinquentiae); first declension^[1]

Etymology

It is formed from Latin dēlinquēns (“offending”) + -ia,^[1] the present participle of dēlinquō (“to fall short, do wrong”).^[2][3]

Earliest recorded meaning

The word is first found in Tertullian (c. 160–220 AD),^[4] in his quotations of the Old Latin Bible, where it means a sin or offence.^[2][5] In Romans 6:23 he reads stipendia enim delinquentiae mors (“for the wages of sin is death”), where the Vulgate has peccatum.^[2]

Semantic evolution

In Late Latin it meant a fault, offence or sin, and it stayed rare: Lewis & Short know it only from two chapters of Tertullian's De resurrectione carnis.^[5][3] Medieval writers kept the same sense of a transgression or sin,^[6][7] and English took it over in the 1630s as delinquency, at first "failure in duty".^[8]

Timeline

• c. 160–220 AD – Tertullian uses it in quotations of the Old Latin version of Romans and in De resurrectione carnis.^[2][4]
• 836–852 – Paschasius Radbertus uses it of the faults of certain brothers in his Epitaphium Arsenii.^[6][4]
• 1630s – English borrows it as delinquency.^[8]

Meanings

Noun

1. (Late Latin) A fault, offence, sin.^[5][2][6]

Related words

• English delinquency

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
3. ^ a b Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
4. ^ a b c Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
5. ^ a b c Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch bis zum ausgehenden 13. Jahrhundert (1967–), Munich: C. H. Beck; Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
7. ^ Niermeyer, J. F. (1976), Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden: Brill
8. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com