LATIN WORD OF THE YEAR 2025 – VOX ANNI MMXXV

The vote for Latin Word of the Year 2025 is now closed. The results can be found here.

With the Vox Anni contest now in its fourth season, the Thesaurus linguae Latinae community is excited to share with you the contestants for Latin Word of the Year 2025. (Learn more about the previous winners, rescellularesocio, and – most recently – retotatototato)

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 six finalists below. Polls will remain open until December 14, 2025, midnight (Central European Time). The winner will be announced on this blog on December 17 and via social media.

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

  1. rhabdomantīa “divination by use of a wand”
  2. rhoezos “noise, din”
  3. rhonchissātor “snorer”
  4. rir (onomatopoeic representation of a dog’s snarl)
  5. risum (accusative) “rice”
  6. roba “clothing”

For a word to be eligible for the competition:

  • its TLL entry must have been published in 2025 (that is, in the lexicon’s most recent fascicle, R12, which runs from reus “defendant, witness” to robustus “made from oak, strong”);
  • 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…).

The application of these criteria means that some of the most significant and entertaining material published in fascicle R12 is excluded. Among its most well known words are: rex, rhetor, rideo, ripa, ritus, and robur. That makes this year’s fascicle a robust and hopefully not too ridiculous contribution to Latin studies.

1. RHABDOMANTIA:

Article author: F. Spoth

Divination by means of sticks was a common practice in the ancient world: such oracles are attested at Dodona, Praeneste, and in the Hebrew Bible; and the English word “lot” (as in “casting lots”) may allude to it. Nevertheless, a technical term for it is extremely rare in Latin and Greek sources. In fact, the original Greek word from which the Latin rhabdomantia derives (ῥαβδομαντεία) is only attested in Latin sources according to the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon! The two Roman authors, Jerome and Julian of Eclanum, who feature it in their commentaries on the biblical prophets, identify wand-divination as a foreign practice, explicitly mark the term as Greek (“which Greeks call …”), and appear to have written the word (mostly) with Greek endings and in the Greek alphabet. Hence one could wonder whether the inclusion of such a thoroughly Greek word in a dictionary of Latin is even justified. However, the fact that Julian at least probably spelt the word with Latin (as opposed to Greek) letters, combined with the the practical consideration of wanting to assist readers of Latin texts with any word they may encounter, makes this piece of magical folklore a worthy addition to the Latin lexicon. (For more on rhabdomancy in antiquity, see the Pauly–Wissowa article s.v. Ῥαβδομαντεία [vol. IA 13–18 Gundel]).

2. RHOEZOS:

Article author: H. Beikircher

Like the previous entry, rhoezos is a Greek word (one, in fact, already found in Homer) but, as indicated by the leading question mark, its occurrence in Latin is far from certain. In fact, it is not actually preserved in the manuscripts of the Pseudo-Virgilian Catalepton 5.2. In place of nonsensical forms, Karl Münscher in 1912 proposed correcting the text to rhoezo, and this is the solution that has found widest acceptance (among other conjectures are: rore, roseo, rhoncho, soso, more, and more). In the poem, the speaker, purporting to be the youthful Roman poet Virgil, bids adieu to the bombastic rhetoricians of contemporary Rome in order to take up philosophical studies in nearby Naples. Against this background, the hollowness of the verbiage taught at rhetorical schools is captured by the un-Attic (read: over-the-top) ‘shrillness’ of its practitioners. Although Greek authors typically use rhoezos of the noise caused by physical movement (of e.g. arrows, wings, and rivers), the word is sometimes applied to the sound of individual letters and words, thereby lending further support to reading it in the Latin passage, too. 

3. RHONCHISSATOR:

Article author: H. Beikircher

This noun, meaning “snorer”, is likely to be the Latin sleeper hit of 2025. It showcases two suffixes that are still productive in English: first, the verbal suffix -isso (cf. English “organ-ize”), which turns the noun rhonchus “snore” (borrowed from Greek) into a verb “to snore”, then the nominal suffix –tor (cf. English “direc-tor”), which turns it into an agent noun, i.e. a person that snores. Latin could easily have used a substantivized participle to express the same idea and this is exactly what Pliny the Elder did when he wrote of the stertentium sonitus or “sound of the snorers” (in this particular case, not so much humans as turtles). But the compound rhonchissator offered the late-antique glossator, who used or perhaps even coined the word, a more concrete and vivid means of expression. Intriguing, too, is the lemma that rhonchissator is adduced to explain: nasator (another agent noun coined for expressive effect, this time derived from nasus “nose”), which gives “being nosy” an entirely new meaning.

4. RIR:

Article author: J. Blundell

How does a dog growl in Latin? Rir, akin to the English “grrrrrr…”, is the answer implied by this canine-friendly candidate for Latin Word of the Year, which also explains why the Romans called the letter R the littera canina. It occurs as part of an ancient etymology of the rare verb ringor, meaning “to snarl” or “grimace”. The entry for rir consists therefore of a cross-reference to the entry ringor (within the R volume, page 1916, line 43), where we read: GLOSS. V 387, 33 ringitur: irascitur, tractum a sono canum rir (“ringitur: gets angry, borrowed from the sound of dogs, rir”).This somewhat fanciful connection with ringor suggests we are meant to picture a belligerent dog growling and perhaps baring its teeth as well. Interestingly, among this year’s shortlisted words, rir is alone in having no connection to Greek, demonstrating just how intertwined Roman and Greek cultures were throughout antiquity.

5. RISVM (acc.):

Article author: J. Blundell

The most well known word for “rice” in Latin is oryza, but this candidate presents a version that is more recognizable to speakers of some Romance languages (and indeed English). The new word, for which only the accusative risum and ablative risi are attested in ancient sources, is the result of several phonological changes. First, the Greek y vowel was unrounded to i (already attested in the variant spelling oriza) and the z changed to s (but it is possible this is just a change of spelling); then, more dramatically the first vowel in oryza was lost, a process that linguists call “aphaeresis” (or “taking away”). Given the two surviving forms, risum and risi, it is difficult to say which declension the word belongs to: risum points to a masculine or neuter second-declension noun, but risi could be a third-declension ablative (or a second-declension genitive, calqueing the Greek, used in place of an ablative or even an indeclinable form?). Given these uncertainties, the TLL article cautiously chose not to unite the forms into a single paradigm. In any case, the new form proved hugely popular in Romance languages, with Italian speakers still today eating riso and Francophones, riz. The word’s preservation is owed to an anonymous sixth-century CE Latin translator of a Greek medical treatise (Alexander of Tralles’ Therapeutica), who – depending on the patient’s condition – recommends the administration or avoidance of a rice-based drink or porridge, an application of rice at Rome already familiar to Horace and Pliny the Elder.

6. ROBA:

Article author: H. Beikircher

Readers familiar with Italian roba and French robe (and hence English robe) will be surprised to see the Latin word roba on a list of newly published ancient Latin words. In fact, while an ancestor of these Romance words must have existed in spoken Latin, evidence for its existence remains tantalizingly indirect. So far the best evidence is not in any Latin text at all, but rather a one-time borrowing into ancient Greek. The Greek inscription that contains the loanword advertises the identity of a man entombed in the coastal city of Korykos (modern-day Kız Kalesi), in southern Anatolia, reading: “(This is the) sarcophagus of Marinos, stitcher of clothes (robōn)”. As the etymology in square brackets explains, roba is borrowed from a Germanic word (cf. English “rob”) for “stolen booty” (especially clothing). The reconstructed status of the Latin word is signaled by the asterisk placed in front of the lemma.

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).


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Adam Gitner (25. November 2025). LATIN WORD OF THE YEAR 2025 – VOX ANNI MMXXV. Parerga. Abgerufen am 10. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/157e6


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