excerpo

Forms

excerpō (present infinitive excerpere, perfect active excerpsī, supine excerptum); third conjugation^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin ex- + carpō (“to pluck”), with ⟨a⟩ weakened to ⟨e⟩ in the compound.^[2][3] De Vaan traces carpō to Proto-Italic *karp- and Proto-Indo-European *kerp-e/o- (“to pick, pluck”).^[4] He compares Hittite karp(ii̯e/a)-zi (“to take away, lift, pluck”), Ancient Greek καρπός (karpós, “fruit”), Lithuanian kir̃pti (“to chop, cut”) and Old English hærfest (“autumn”).^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

De Vaan dates it from Terence, where a character complains that someone picks out what is good and tells only what is bad.^[4][2][5]

Semantic evolution

The literal sense, picking seeds out of fruit, is in Horace.^[2][6] Cicero uses it of picking out mentally, of choosing what good there is among evils, and of selecting passages from books: he made extracts of what each writer seemed to teach best.^[2][6] From this it became the word for excerpting.^[2] Late spellings include ⟨excarpo⟩ and ⟨scarpo⟩, as in a council of Tours of 567, which has ⟨scarpsa⟩ for an excerpted reading.^[3]

Timeline

• 190–159 BC – Terence of picking out the good.^[4][2][5]
• 81–43 BC – Cicero of choosing and of making extracts from books.^[2][6][5]
• 65–8 BC – Horace of picking seeds from fruit.^[2][5]
• 567 – A council of Tours has the form scarpsa.^[3]

Meanings

Verb

1. To pick out, take out.^[2][6]
2. To pick out mentally, select; to select a passage, excerpt, make extracts from a book.^[2][6][7][1]
3. To take away, remove.^[2]

Word family

• excerptiō

Related words

• carpō
• dēcerpō
• discerpō

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ a b c d de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
5. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
6. ^ a b c d e Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Stelten, Leo F. (1995), Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson