racco

Forms

raccō (present infinitive raccāre); first conjugation, no passive, no perfect or supine stems^[1] Also rancō and rachō.^[2][3]

Etymology

The verb is onomatopoeic, imitating the cry of the tiger.^[2][1] The TLL treats ⟨raccō⟩, ⟨rancō⟩ and ⟨rachō⟩ as spellings of one verb.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

Suetonius (c. 75–c. 150 AD) wrote in a fragment tigridum est rancare (“to rancare is the tigers'”), with variant readings in rach-.^[2][4]

Semantic evolution

The spelling raccant appears in poems of the Latin Anthology, among them the Carmen de Philomela, where other manuscripts read rancant.^[2][5][3] A Latin glossary lists tigrides rachare, and a Toledo glossary racare.^[2] A conjecture puts rancant for leopards in the Historia Augusta, but the manuscripts read rictant.^[2]

Timeline

• c. 75–c. 150 AD – Suetonius names rancare as the cry of tigers.^[2][4]

Meanings

Verb

1. (intransitive, of tigers) To give the natural cry of the tiger.^[5][3][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 Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
3. ^ a b c Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
4. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
5. ^ a b Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press