glomero

Forms

glomerō (present infinitive glomerāre, perfect active glomerāvī, supine glomerātum); first conjugation^[1]

Etymology

It is from Latin glomus (“ball of thread”) + -ō, a denominal verb.^[2][1][3] De Vaan traces glomus to Proto-Italic *glemos and Proto-Indo-European *glem-o/es-, and explains the ⟨o⟩ as a Latin change after a velarized /l/;^[4] Romance forms such as Romanian ghem (“ball of thread”) seem to keep the older vowel.^[4] He compares Lithuanian glomóti (“to embrace”) and Old English clamm (“tie, fetters”).^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

De Vaan dates it from Varro, who describes balls of food made from figs mixed with spelt.^[4][2]

Semantic evolution

It means to wind or form into a ball, as Ovid of wool, and to gather things into a dense mass: Lucretius has the seeds of the voice pressed together as they leave the mouth.^[2][5] Cicero's poem on his consulship uses it of gathering abstract things.^[2] Virgil uses it of gathering a band of men for war, and in the Georgics of a horse taught to bunch its proud steps.^[2] Lewis & Short call it poetic and post-Augustan in prose.^[5]

Timeline

• 116–27 BC – Varro of balls of food.^[2][4][6]
• 96–55 BC – Lucretius of the seeds of the voice.^[2][6]
• 70–19 BC – Virgil of gathering a band for war.^[2][6]
• 43 BC–18 AD – Ovid of winding wool into balls.^[5][6]

Meanings

Verb

1. To form or wind into a ball.^[2][5][1]
2. To gather into a dense mass, heap up; to accumulate.^[2][1]
3. To assemble people or animals into a crowd; in the passive, to throng together.^[2][1]
4. To make a rapid succession of movements; to cover a course quickly.^[2]

Word family

• agglomerō
• conglomerō
• glomerabilis
• glomerāmen
• glomerātim
• glomerātiō
• inglomerō

Related words

• glomus

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 Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ a b c d e 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 Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de