floruit

English

Alternative forms

• fl., flor. (abbreviation)

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from Latin flōruit (“he/she/it flourished”), from flōreō (“bloom, flourish”), from flōs (“flower”).

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈflɔɹ(j)uɪt/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈflɔːɹʊɪt/, /ˈflɒɹʊɪt/

Verb

floruit

1. (defective, rare except abbreviated) lived, used in biographies to indicate a time period during which a person is known to have been alive, when dates of birth and/or death are not known.
   • 1895, Arthur Cayley Headlam, The Church Quarterly Review, page 155:

     Marius Mercator must have shared the vigour of Alcimus, for he floruit in 218 according to Mr. Miller , while he at any rate existed in 418.

   • 1993 November 15, Joseph Cary, A Ghost in Trieste, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 230:

     J. Joyce (floruit 1850)
     In 1926 Svevo wrote a letter to James Joyce in Paris inquiring if he were related to the J. Joyce who in 1850 had had printed and published by Lloyd Austriaco in Trieste a book[...]

   • 2003, Banāsā, Banasa: A Spiritual Autobiography, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, →ISBN, page 86:

     Mīrā (Bai). Floruit 16th century. Rajasthan's most famous female saint and poetess of Kṛṣṇa bhakti.

Usage notes

• Almost always used abbreviated as fl.

• In translated Latin sources, the term implies the time period during the person's heyday or most productive years of life, rather than lifespan itself.

• The term is borrowed from Latin and no other conjugation is used in English.

Noun

floruit (plural floruits)

1. The time period during which a person, group, culture, etc. is at its peak.

   Synonym: flowering

   • 2005, James A. Arieti, Philosophy in the Ancient World‎^[1], Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page xxi:

     Though Aristotle claimed that a human being reaches his intellectual peak at age forty-nine (Rhetoric 1390b9), chronologists reckon a person's flowering—his floruit—at about age forty. The mists of time have made the precise reckoning of chronology quite difficult. Sometimes, when a birth is not known, a floruit can be estimated on the basis of what is known about an individual's career.

Translations

peak period of a person/culture/group

• Finnish: kukoistus (fi), kukoistuskausi (fi)
• Russian: ^{(please verify)} го́ды расцве́та pl (gódy rascvéta)

Latin

Verb

flōruit

1. third-person singular perfect active indicative of flōreō ([he, she or it] flourished)
2. (in post-Classical texts) was productive around the time of