ilex.
holm-oak, great scarlet oak, tree or wood; its acorn;
Meaning & usage
holm oak (Quercus ilex)
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.