Latin from scratch #7.16: The fifth declension

In the sixteenth class of the Latin from Scratch course, we’ll study the fifth declension, so we finish with declensions. There are not many nouns in the fifth declension and they are not so frequent except for a few of them. We’ll only find one type.

I explain everything in the following video (⏳ 04m 38s ⌛):

Morphology of the fifth declension

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We already know that the nouns of the fifth declension are those in whose statement we can see that the genitive ends in ‑ei.

nom. sg.	diēs	nom. pl.	diēs
voc. sg.	diēs	voc. pl.	diēs
ac. sg.	diĕm	ac. pl.	diēs
gen. sg.	diēī	gen. pl.	diērŭm
dat. sg.	diēī	dat. pl.	diēbŭs
ab. sg.	diē	ab. pl.	diēbŭs

All the nouns are feminine. The only exception is dies, diei (and its compound meridies, meridiei), which is masculine with the wider meaning of ‘day (period of time)’ and feminine with the more specific meaning of ‘appointed day, date’.

Some nouns of the fifth declension

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There aren’t many nouns in the fifth declension. However, some of them are worth memorizing:

• dies, diei — day
• res, rei — thing, matter
• spes, spei — hope
• species, speciei — appearance, aspect
• facies, faciei — appearance, shape

Now we are done learning declensions! Since neither the fourth nor the fifth declension have adjectives, we can go already to the texts corresponding to this new knowledge, with all types of nouns!

Next: The fifth declension →