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
- Gout in the feet, a rheumatic disease of the feet; the part affected.[1][3]
- A similar disease in animals and birds.[1]
Word family
- podagricus
- podagrōsus
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
- ^ 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
- ^ a b c d e Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- ^ a b c d e Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de