Etymologically
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immanitas

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Forms

immānitās f (genitive immānitātis); third declension[1] It is also spelled inm-.[2]

Etymology

It is from Latin immānis (“huge, savage”) + -tās.[2][3] ⟨Immānis⟩ is the negative of an old adjective mānus (“good”), “not good”.[4][1] De Vaan traces ⟨mānus⟩ to Proto-Italic *māno- and Proto-Indo-European *meh₂-no- (“good”), cognate with Old Irish maith (“good”), but calls the further root uncertain.[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Köbler's first source is Claudius Quadrigarius,[5] who says no one dared come forward because of a man's great size and frightful looks.[2]

Semantic evolution

It is savage character, brutality, and of persons a monster: Cicero asks what plague, what monster the province had suffered.[2] Of actions it is enormity, barbarity, as in Cicero's “the enormity of so great a crime”.[2] It is also vast size, hugeness, rarer but classical, as in a surveyor's huge tracts of land and Gellius' serpent of unheard-of size.[2][6]

Church Latin glosses it “cruelty, fierceness”.[7]

Timeline

  • 1st century BC – Claudius Quadrigarius of a frightful man.[2][5]
  • 81–43 BC – Cicero of monstrous men and crimes.[2][5]
  • c. 165 AD – Gellius of a huge serpent.[6][5]

Meanings

Noun

  1. Savage character, brutality, barbarity; a monster.[2][6][1][7]
  2. Enormity of an action.[2][1]
  3. Vast size, hugeness, immensity.[2][6][1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e 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. ^ Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
  4. ^ a b 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 Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  7. ^ a b Stelten, Leo F. (1995), Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson