excoquo

Forms

excoquō (present infinitive excoquere, perfect active excoxī, supine excoctum); third conjugation^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin ex- + coquō (“to cook”).^[2][3][1] De Vaan traces coquō to Proto-Italic *kʷekʷe/o- (“to cook”) and Proto-Indo-European *pekʷ-e/o- (“to cook”), cognate with Ancient Greek πέσσω (péssō, “to cook”) and Sanskrit पचन्ति (pácanti, “they cook”).^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLL finds it first in Plautus and Cato.^[3] In Plautus' Captivi someone's wealth is called rich enough to boil the tallow out of, and Cato has boiling a liquid down by half.^[2][5]

Semantic evolution

Its first sense is to remove by boiling or heat, to boil away or extract by cooking or smelting.^[2] It is also to cook thoroughly, as Varro's roast meat with little juice, and to heat thoroughly, melt down or smelt, as Vitruvius' carbuncle made from matter baked through; fire hardens iron.^[2][5] Lucretius has the sun drying out the earth.^[2] The TLL notes that it is missing in many authors, among them Cicero, Sallust and Livy, and that it lives on in Provençal and in Spanish escocer.^[3] Stelten gives “refine, boil down, burn out; destroy”.^[6]

Timeline

• c. 250–184 BC – Plautus, of boiling out fat.^[2][3][7]
• 234–149 BC – Cato, of boiling down.^[2][5][7]
• 96–55 BC – Lucretius, of the sun drying the earth.^[2][7]
• c. 84–c. 25 BC – Vitruvius, of smelting.^[2][7]

Meanings

Verb

1. To boil or burn away; to extract by cooking or smelting.^[2][5][1][6]
2. To produce by cooking or heating.^[2]
3. To cook thoroughly; to heat thoroughly, melt down; to harden by heat, temper.^[2][5][1]
4. To dry up, parch.^[2][1]

Word family

• excoctio
• inexcoctus

Related words

• coquō
• coctus

References

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