Archiv des Autors: Adam Gitner

LATIN WORD OF THE YEAR 2025 – VOX ANNI MMXXV

After a record-breaking vote the Latin Word of the Year 2025 has been chosen: rhonchissator!

Rhonchissator (pronounced “wrong-kiss-SAH-tor”), a Latin agent noun meaning “snorer”, has soundly resonated with more than a third of all participants (521 of the total of 1374 votes registered). The word’s popularity is likely a testament not only to its rhonchous charm, but also to the persistent sleepiness many of us experience at the end of the year. Perhaps, too, some share a home or an office with an enthusiastically snoring human (or animal) being. Others still may proudly proclaim for themselves the grand title of rhonchissator maximus. Possibly coined by an ancient scholar trying to explain another extremely rare word (nasator “someone who uses their nose”) and (mis?)spelled runcissator in both manuscripts that preserve it, rhonchissator has lived a life of blissful obscurity for many centuries. But surely now, gently awoken from its millennial slumber (by the article author Hugo Beikircher) and instantly propelled to global Latin fame (by being voted Latin Word of the Year 2025), rhonchissator will be a sleeper agent no more.

Also deserving of a special mention in this year’s contest is rir (which ranked in second place with 28% of the vote), another word only transmitted to us through the industry and ingenuity of late-antique glossators, who were in many ways the precursors of modern-day lexicographers. (To learn more about ancient glossaries, a veritable treasure-trove of uncommon and bizarre Latin words, you can consult the TLL-affiliated Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum Online and read about the brand new TGL-ReACH.) That this verbal representation of a dog’s growl (“grrrrrrrrrrr…”) did not take this year’s top prize may be partly owed to the 2024 winner, the similarly onomatopoeic retotatototato, and could, if more tentatively, suggest that there is a higher percentage of cat lovers than canine afficionados among everyday Latinists. (More information about these and the other candidates in the 2025 contest can be found here.)

We wish all readers and supporters of the TLL a snore-filled conclusion to 2025 and a snarl-free start to the new year, and we warmly thank all the participants who voted in and shared this year’s contest!

Previous Latin Words of the Year can be found here: rescellularesocio, retotatototato. For more information about the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, please visit our website, follow our blog and podcast. If you want to learn more about how a Latin dictionary is made, consider applying to the 2026 TLL Latin Lexicography Summer School.

If you would like to support the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, please donate to the Friends of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae non-profit organization. Its most immediate goal is to build an endowment to support an American postdoctoral fellow, now that the National Endowment for the Humanities has terminated the grant that has funded this fellowship every year since 1984.

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

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)

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LATIN WORD OF THE YEAR 2024 – VOX ANNI MMXXIV

And the 2024 Latin Word of the Year is . . . RETOTATOTOTATO

Image from Päll 2004

This year’s winner––and by a very wide margin (60% of the vote)––is arguably not a word at all, but a sequence of syllables imitating a musical fanfare. The letters were scratched into the wall of a house in Pompeii shortly before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and have sometimes been mistaken for a magical formula. But, as Janika Päll has argued, the presence of Greek musical notes above the letters makes a musical interpretation likely. In fact, most of the syllables correspond to Greek vocables (TO TE TA) that represent musical pitches according to an ancient solmization system, a bit like the familiar “do re mi” (discussed by Annie Bélis and Armand D’Angour). A similar sequence in Greek appears on a 5th-century BCE clay thigh-guard next to a trumpet-playing Amazon: totē totote (Pöhlmann and West, Documents in Ancient Greek Music, nr. 1; listen to one rendition). Hence the association of our Latin “word” with a trumpet or wind instrument. Yet the syllable re, if it has been identified correctly, does not have a known pitch value. So maybe the “word” is something between an onomatopoeic coinage such as Ennius’s taratantara and a precise melodic transcription.

A special mention goes to the runner-up, revaleo “be well again”, with about 18.5% of the vote.

With a big Latin fanfare we wish all our readers a good start to 2025, and we thank all the participants who voted in and shared this contest!

This year we have to add an important correction––retroactim, so to speak––noticed by Mark Thakkar: the word reteiaclor is in fact already in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, so it should not have been included among the finalists. An attractive alternative etymology for this word from rete-iac(u)lor (rather than retiaculum) has also been mentioned by Michael Weiss.

Previous Latin Words of the Year can be found here. For more information about the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, please visit our website, follow our blog and podcast. If you want to learn more about how a Latin dictionary is made, consider applying to the 2025 TLL Latin Lexicography Summer School.

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

 

Latin Word of the Year 2024

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):

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