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).
