podagra

Forms

podagra f (genitive podagrae); first declension^[1] Manuscripts and glosses also have potagra.^[2]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Ancient Greek ποδάγρα (podágra, “gout in the feet”).^[1][3][2] Köbler glosses the Greek word also “foot trap” and connects it with πούς (poús, “foot”) and a root meaning “hunt”.^[4] A late writer quoted in the TLL says the Greeks named it from the hindering or holding fast of the feet or from the cruel pain, and Isidore takes this over.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLL finds it in prose from Cicero, and Catullus has it in verse.^[2] Cicero speaks in the Tusculan Disputations of being racked by the pains of gout.^[3]

Semantic evolution

It is gout in the feet, and also the part affected.^[1] Virgil uses it of a similar disease of flocks.^[1] Ovid calls gout knotty, Juvenal speaks of a rich man's gout, and Celsus has the plural.^[3] The TLL notes that it is commonest in Pliny the Elder, more than 70 times, and in the medical writers, mostly in the plural, and that glosses explain it as a swelling or pain of the feet.^[2] It has Romance descendants.^[2]

Timeline

• 81–43 BC – Cicero, of the pains of gout.^[3][2][4]
• 81/79–52/50 BC – Catullus, in verse.^[2][4]
• 70–19 BC – Virgil, of a disease of flocks.^[1][4]
• 23/24–79 AD – Pliny the Elder, often.^[2][4]

Meanings

Noun

1. Gout in the feet, a rheumatic disease of the feet; the part affected.^[1][3]
2. A similar disease in animals and birds.^[1]

Word family

• podagricus
• podagrōsus

References

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