Unadapted borrowing fromLatinflōruit(“he/she/it flourished”), fromflōreō(“bloom, flourish”), fromflōs(“flower”).
floruit
- (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, page155:Marius Mercator must have shared the vigour of Alcimus, for hefloruit in 218 according to Mr. Miller , while he at any rateexisted in 418.
1993 November 15, Joseph Cary,A Ghost in Trieste, University of Chicago Press,→ISBN, page230: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, page86:Mīrā (Bai).Floruit 16th century. Rajasthan's most famous female saint and poetess of Kṛṣṇa bhakti.
- Almost always used abbreviated asfl.
- In translated Latin sources, the term implies the time period during the person'sheyday or most productive years of life, rather than lifespan itself.
- The term is borrowed from Latin and no other conjugation is used in English.
floruit (pluralfloruits)
- Thetime period during which aperson,group,culture, etc. is at itspeak.
- 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—hisfloruit—at about age forty. The mists of time have made the precise reckoning of chronology quite difficult. Sometimes, when a birth is not known, afloruit can be estimated on the basis of what is known about an individual's career.
peak period of a person/culture/group
flōruit
- third-personsingularperfectactiveindicative offlōreō ([he, she or it]flourished)
- (in post-Classical texts) wasproductive around the time of
