Etymologically
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septenus

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Pronunciation

  • Classical: [sɛpˈteː.nʊs][1]
  • Ecclesiastical: [sepˈtɛː.nus][1]

Forms

septēnus (feminine septēna, neuter septēnum); first/second-declension numeral[1] The genitive plural is septēnum.[2][3]

Etymology

It is from Latin septem (“seven”) + -ēnī.[2][1][4] Wiktionary takes it to come from an earlier ⟨*septemsnos⟩.[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Köbler dates it from Plautus,[4] who has a slave boy told to start the games with seven ladlefuls each, from the top.[2][3]

Semantic evolution

It is a distributive, mostly in the plural septēnī, "seven each": Livy has seven iugera of land given to each of the plebs and two bundles of seven books each, and Cicero boys of sixteen and seventeen years.[2][3] It also means seven at a time: in Virgil the Athenians must send seven of their children every year, and Juvenal speaks of hating someone seven hours a day.[2] With little distributive force it is simply "seven", of things that form a set: Virgil has a snake drawing seven coils, Ovid a pipe of seven reeds, and Seneca and Propertius the seven mouths of the Nile.[2][3] In the singular it means sevenfold, mostly in poetry and post-Augustan prose: Lucan has the sevenfold stream of the Nile, and Statius the seven-mouthed Danube.[2][3] Gellius uses bis septēnī for fourteen.[2]

Timeline

  • c. 250–184 BC – Plautus of seven ladles each.[2][4]
  • 81–43 BC – Cicero in the genitive septēnum.[2][3]
  • 70–19 BC – Virgil of seven children sent each year.[2]
  • 59 BC–17 AD – Livy of seven iugera each.[2]
  • 39–65 AD – Lucan of the sevenfold Nile.[2][3]

Meanings

Numeral

  1. (plural) Seven each, seven apiece; seven at a time.[2][3][1]
  2. (plural, with little distributive force) Seven, of a set.[2][3][1]
  3. (singular, poetic) Sevenfold, repeated seven times.[2][3][1]

Word family

  • septēnārius

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  4. ^ a b c Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de