Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The Indo-European language of the ancient Latins and Romans and the most important cultural language of western Europe until the end of the 17th century.
  • noun The Latin language and literature from the end of the third century BC to the end of the second century AD.
  • noun A member of a Latin people, especially a native or inhabitant of Latin America.
  • noun A Latino or Latina.
  • noun A native or resident of ancient Latium.
  • adjective Of, relating to, or composed in Latin.
  • adjective Of or relating to ancient Rome, its people, or its culture.
  • adjective Of or relating to Latium, its people, or its culture.
  • adjective Of or relating to the languages that developed from Latin, such as Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, or to the peoples that speak them.
  • adjective Of or relating to the peoples, countries, or cultures of Latin America.
  • adjective Of or relating to Latinos or their culture.
  • adjective Of or relating to the Roman Catholic Church.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To turn into Latin; interlard with Latin.
  • To use Latin words or phrases.
  • Of, pertaining to, or derived from ancient Latium or its inhabitants: as, the Latin cities; the Latin wars; the Latin language.
  • Pertaining to or having affinity with the ancient Latins in the wider sense of the word: so applied from the spread of the language and civilization of the people of Latium throughout Italy and the Roman empire: as, the Latin races of southern Europe; the Latin arts.
  • Relating or pertaining to, or composed in, the language of the ancient Latins or Romans: as, a Latin idiom; a Latin poem. See II., 3.
  • The Roman Catholic Church.
  • Synonyms See Roman.
  • noun A member of the race that inhabited ancient Latium in central Italy, including Rome; afterward, one to whom the Latin language was vernacular; an ancient Roman, Italian, etc.
  • noun In modern application, a member of one of the races ethnically and linguistically related to the ancient Romans or Italians, by descent or intermixture: as, the Latins of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal.
  • noun The language of ancient Rome; the language originally spoken in Latium, and afterward extended over all the integral parts of the Roman empire in Europe, which is the basis of the modern Romance languages (see Romance), and has supplied the greater part in bulk of the vocabulary of modern English (see English).
  • noun A member of the Latin or Roman Catholic Church: the designation most frequently used by Greek Catholics and other Oriental Christians for Roman Catholics.
  • noun A member of a civil community in Turkey composed of such subjects of the Sultan as are of foreign ancestry and of the Roman Catholic faith.
  • noun 6 An exercise in schools, consisting in turning English into Latin.
  • noun The divisions and periods of the Latin vary more or less with different writers. As generally adopted, and as somewhat more precisely discriminated in this dictionary and systematically followed in the etymologies, they are here defined in chronological order:
  • noun Abbreviated L. or Lat.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to Latium, or to the Latins, a people of Latium; Roman.
  • adjective Of, pertaining to, or composed in, the language used by the Romans or Latins
  • adjective (Eccl. Hist.) the Western or Roman Catholic Church, as distinct from the Greek or Eastern Church.
  • adjective See Illust. 1 of Cross.
  • adjective a designation sometimes loosely given to certain nations, esp. the French, Spanish, and Italians, who speak languages principally derived from Latin.
  • adjective an association of states, originally comprising France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, which, in 1865, entered into a monetary agreement, providing for an identity in the weight and fineness of the gold and silver coins of those countries, and for the amounts of each kind of coinage by each. Greece, Servia, Roumania, and Spain subsequently joined the Union.
  • noun A native or inhabitant of Latium; a Roman.
  • noun The language of the ancient Romans.
  • noun obsolete An exercise in schools, consisting in turning English into Latin.
  • noun (Eccl.) A member of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • noun barbarous Latin; a jargon in imitation of Latin.
  • noun terms used indifferently to designate the latest stages of the Latin language; low Latin (and, perhaps, late Latin also), including the barbarous coinages from the French, German, and other languages into a Latin form made after the Latin had become a dead language for the people.
  • noun that kind of late, or low, Latin, used in statutes and legal instruments; -- often barbarous.
  • transitive verb obsolete To write or speak in Latin; to turn or render into Latin.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or relating to the language spoken in ancient Rome and other cities of Latium.
  • adjective Of or relating to the script of the language spoken in ancient Rome and many modern alphabets.
  • adjective Of or relating to ancient Rome or its Empire.
  • adjective Of or relating to Latium (modern Lazio), the region around Rome.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French and from Old English lǣden, both from Latin Latīnus, from Latium, an ancient country of west-central Italy.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin latīnus, from Latium ("the region around Rome") + -īnus ("adjective suffix").

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