melancholia

Forms

melancholia f (genitive melancholiae); first declension^[1][2] Manuscripts and glossaries also spell it melancolia, melanconia and melencholia.^[3][4] Celsus, Gellius and some manuscripts of Jerome write it in Greek letters.^[3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Ancient Greek μελαγχολία (melankholía, “black bile; madness”),^[1][5][4] from μέλας (mélas, “black”) and χολή (kholḗ, “bile”).^[6][7]

Isidore of Seville explained the name from the dregs of black blood mixed with an excess of bile.^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

Cicero is the first to use it, still in Greek letters, in the Tusculan Disputations: what the Romans call furor², he says, the Greeks call melancholy, as though the mind were moved only by black bile.^[3]

Semantic evolution

In the medical writers it is the black bile, one of the humours of the body, and the mental illness it was thought to cause, a kind of insanity;^[3][1] Celsus and Gellius still wrote it in Greek, while Vindicianus, Caelius Aurelianus and the Latin Oribasius use it as a Latin word.^[3][1] Isidore set it beside blood, choler and phlegm, each humour matching one of the four elements, melancholy matching earth.^[3] Jerome uses it of monks driven to melancholy by the tedium of solitude.^[3]

Ecclesiastical writers took it in the sense of gloom or dejection.^[5] British medieval sources have the black bile of medical theory, the condition of having too much of it, and also bad temper or ill will.^[4] English melancholy came from it through Old French in about 1300,^[7] and New Latin melancholia was taken over in English as a medical term in the 1690s.^[7]

Timeline

• 81–43 BC – Cicero quotes the Greek word for madness.^[3][6]
• 14–37 AD – Celsus names the black bile in Greek letters.^[3][6]
• 4th century AD – Vindicianus counts it among the humours of the body.^[3][6]
• 5th century AD – Caelius Aurelianus describes it as an illness.^[3][1][6]
• c. 560–636 AD – Isidore links each humour to an element.^[3][6]
• c. 1300 – English melancholy, through Old French.^[7]
• 1690s – English melancholia, from New Latin.^[7]

Meanings

Noun

1. black bile, one of the four humours of the body.^[3][2][4]
2. melancholy, a kind of madness caused by black bile.^[3][1]
3. (Ecclesiastical Latin) Gloom, dejection.^[5]
4. (Medieval Latin) Bad temper, ill will.^[4]

Word family

• melancholicus

Related words

• English melancholy

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
2. ^ a b Gaffiot, Félix (2016), Dictionnaire latin-français, new ed. by Gérard Gréco et al. (Gaffiot 2016), online ed.
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ a b c d e Latham, R. E., D. R. Howlett, R. K. Ashdowne, et al. (1975–2013), Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, London: British Academy / Oxford University Press
5. ^ a b c Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
6. ^ a b c d e f Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
7. ^ a b c d e Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com