ilex

See also: Ilex

English

An ilex.

Etymology

Etymology tree

Latin ilexbor.

English ilex

Borrowed from Latin ilex (“holm oak”).

Noun

ilex (plural ilexes or ilices)

1. Holm oak (Quercus ilex).
   • 1818 (date written), Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mazenghi”, in Mary W[ollstonecraft] Shelley, editor, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: […] [C. H. Reynell] for John and Henry L[eigh] Hunt, […], published 1824, →OCLC, stanza 9, page 259:

     There is a point of strand / Near Vada's tower and town; and on one side / The treacherous marsh divides it from the land, / Shadowed by pine and ilex forests wide, / And on the other creeps eternally, / Through muddy weeds, the shallow, sullen sea.

   • 1826, [Mary Shelley], chapter X, in The Last Man. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC:

     Many nights, though autumnal mists were spread around, I passed under an ilex—many times I have supped on arbutus berries and chestnuts, making a fire, gypsylike, on the ground […]

   • 1962, Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Peter Green, The Prime of Life, Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, translation of La Force de l'âge, →OCLC, page 77:

     Sometimes I lost track of them and had to hunt round in a circle, thrusting through sharp-scented bushes, scratching myself on various plants which were still new to me: resinaceous rock-roses, juniper, ilex [translating chênes verts], yellow and white asphodel.

2. Any of the numerous trees or shrubs of the genus Ilex.

See also

• ilex on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• ilex on Wikispecies.Wikispecies

Anagrams

• Lexi, elix

Latin

the holly-like foliage of ilex
(Quercus ilex)

Etymology

Probably from a lost non-Indo-European substrate language.

Many Romance descendants or cognates, such as Italian elce, start with a vowel that is not the regular outcome of Latin long ī, but instead of Latin long ē or short i. A phonetic value like this is attested also in Isidore, who by false etymology associates ilex with ēlectus. According to one hypothesis, such Romance forms descend from an Osco-Umbrian alternative form that started with *ēl-, from earlier *eil- (> classical Latin īl-). Hall 1939 finds this unlikely, and prefers explaining Italian elce by contamination from a descendant of aesculum.

Pronunciation

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈiː.ɫɛks]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈiː.leks]

Noun

īlex f (genitive īlicis); third declension

1. holm oak (Quercus ilex)

Declension

Third-declension noun.

	singular	plural
nominative	īlex	īlicēs
genitive	īlicis	īlicum
dative	īlicī	īlicibus
accusative	īlicem	īlicēs
ablative	īlice	īlicibus
vocative	īlex	īlicēs

Derived terms

• īlignus

Descendants

• Inherited:
  • Aragonese: lecina, licena, llecina
  • Asturian: ardina
  • Catalan: alzina
  • French: yeuse
  • Galician: ⇒ aciñeira
  • Italian: elce
  • Mirandese: arzina
  • Occitan: euse, ausina
  • Portuguese: azinha/enzinha, ⇒ azinheira/enzinheira
  • Sardinian: ilighe
  • Sicilian: ìlici
  • Spanish: encina
• Borrowings:
  • Translingual: Ilex
  • → Albanian: ilqe
  • → English: Ilex (learned)
  • → Esperanto: ilekso (learned)
  • → Ido: ilexo (learned)

Further reading

• “ilex”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “ilex”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891), An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• “ilex”, in Gaffiot, Félix (1934), Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.

Old French

Adverb

ilex

1. alternative form of iluec