lanx

Latin lanx

lanx (plural lances)

1. (historical) A platter or dish for serving food in Ancient Rome.

Compare Ancient Greek λέκος (lékos, “dish, pan”), λεκάνη (lekánē, “basin, dish”) (whence English lecanomancy). Walde and Hoffmann, and Pokorny, suppose these words inherited from PIE and connected with words meaning "crooked", such as Latin licinus (“bent upward”), luxus (“dislocated”); the root Pokorny assigns[1] is, in updated reconstruction, *Heh₃l- (“to bend, to turn”). De Vaan objects on phonological and semantic grounds (plates are not crooked) and favours Ernout and Meillet's assumption that Greek and Latin instead share a Mediterranean cultural loanword from substrate languages.[2]

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /lanks/, [ɫ̪äŋks̠]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /lanks/, [läŋks]

lanx f (genitive lancis); third declension

1. dish, platter, plate
2. scalepan

Third-declension noun.

• aequilanx
• bilanx

• Italian: lance

• “lanx”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “lanx”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• lanx in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
• “lanx”, in Harry Thurston Peck, editor (1898), Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York: Harper & Brothers
• “lanx”, in William Smith et al., editor (1890), A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, London: William Wayte. G. E. Marindin