The vote for Latin Word of the Year 2024 is now closed. The results can be found here.

With the Vox Anni contest now in its third season, the Thesaurus linguae Latinae community is excited to share with you the contestants for Latin Word of the Year 2024. (Learn more about the previous winners, rescellula and resocio.)

Whether you are a professional Classicist, a fan of sword-and-sandal cinema, or simply Latin-curious, we invite you to choose your favorite word from the five finalists below. Polls will remain open until December 19, 2024, midnight (Central European Time). The winner will be announced on this blog on December 20 and via social media.

The finalists for this year’s Latin Word of the Year are (in alphabetical order):

1. reteiaclor “to net, fish out”
2. retotatototato (onomatopoeic imitation of a wind instrument)
3. retroactim “retroactively”
4. revaleo “to be well again”
5. revolumen “churning”

For a word to be eligible for the competition:

• its TLL entry must have been published in 2024 (that is, in the lexicon’s most recent fascicle R11, which runs from resurgo “rise up again” to reus “defendant, witness”);
• it is a new word in the sense that it is not found in any of the standard ancient Latin dictionaries (the lexica we used to determine lexical “newness” include Blaise’s Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens, Castiglioni–Mariotti, Forcellini, Le grand Gaffiot, Georges, Lewis & Short, the Oxford Latin Dictionary, Souter’s Glossary of Later Latin, and the Woordenboek Latijn/Nederlands);
• it was deemed of particular merit by an internal preselection on morphological, semantic, and/or thematic grounds (in other words, the lemma struck us as particularly interesting, funny, or relevant…).

By coincidence, all the shortlisted words this year occur only a single time each in surviving Latin texts. Or, to use a Greek term, they are all hapax legomena (“said once”).

1. RĒTEIACLOR (-ārī):

A verb derived from the rare retiaculum (“throwing-net”), the even rarer reteiaclor is intriguing because of who used it and how it was used. Its single extant occurrence comes in the personal correspondence of a famous Roman emperor: Marcus Aurelius. In addition to playing a significant role in Ridley Scott’s 2000 Gladiator, he is now perhaps best known for authoring the Meditations (which, as a bilingual, he wrote in Greek). But the verb also stands out from a lexicographic point of view. In lieu of its expected, literal meaning (“capture with a net”) it denotes the process of finding an answer to a difficult question.

2. RETOTATOTOTATO:

This expression, with no apparent meaning or etymology, appears to have been coined on the spot to capture the sound of a musical instrument, perhaps the trumpet. We find it scratched on a wall in Pompeii – a town, whose everyday life and written culture are exceptionally well preserved for us as a result of the disastrous eruption of the nearby volcano in 79 CE. Did the anonymous graffiti artist intend their lexical innovation to rival the early Roman poet Ennius, who had already described the war-bugle as crying out (a terrifying and equally T-heavy) taratantara?

3. RETROĀCTIM (adv.):

Participants in last year’s contest may remember the originator of this word, Virgilius Maro grammaticus. Despite the professional title, used by convention, he was probably more of a cultural fabricator and esoteric philosopher than a “grammarian”. As a one-off adverb coined from the verb retro agere (“push back”), retroactim (“retroactively”) refers to the process by which certain “calculators” measure time by “going backward”. Perhaps a fitting choice for the retrospective glance many of us adopt at the conclusion of a year?

4. REVALEO (-ēre):

This word may look familiar to those who know the common Latin farewells, vale! and valete! (idiomatically “goodbye!”, but literally “be healthy!”). With the addition of the prefix re- (“again”), the compound verb means “be well again”. The word survives thanks to a fourth-century sepulchral epigram, found in the Cemetery of Callixtus in Rome. Although much of the text is now lost, the deceased, a devout Christian, appears to express his expectation of “being strong again” in the afterlife.

5. REVOLV̄MEN (-inis n.):

As one of several Latin action nouns ultimately derived from the verb revolvo (“roll back or over”), revolumen describes the “churning” of the sea in a passage from a late-antique novel about the miraculous adventures of the fictional Tyrian king Apollonius. Revolumen has been overshadowed by its better known synonym, revolutio. In a time of abrupt political changes, it is good to be reminded of the original, physical and spatial reference of these words. Would Karl Marx have heard a premonition of societal upheaval in the murmur of clashing waves?

Have you made your decision? Vote for the Latin Word of the Year here!

Interested in learning more about the TLL? Visit the project website here!

Text by Massimo Cè (University of Basel) and Adam Gitner (Thesaurus linguae Latinae).

 

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