Word.ws English Dictionary

floruit

UK/ˈflɔːɹʊɪt//ˈflɔɹ(j)uɪt/

floruit verb: lived, flourished; used in biographies to indicate a time period during which a person is known to have been alive or known to have been notably active, when dates of birth and/or death are not known.

Verb

floruit

  1. (defective, rare except abbreviated) Lived, flourished; used in biographies to indicate a time period during which a person is known to have been alive or known to have been notably active, when dates of birth and/or death are not known.
    • 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 418.1895, Arthur Cayley Headlam, The Church Quarterly Review, page 155
    • 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[...]1993 November 15, Joseph Cary, A Ghost in Trieste, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 230

Noun

floruit (plural floruits)

  1. The time period during which a person, group, culture, etc. is at its peak.
    • 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...2005, James A. Arieti, Philosophy in the Ancient World, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page xxi
    Synonyms:
    flowering

Synonyms of floruit

Forms of floruit

Verb
alternative abbreviationfl.
alternative abbreviationflor.
Noun
pluralfloruits

Origin of floruit

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

Questions about floruit

What does floruit mean?
Floruit means lived, flourished; used in biographies to indicate a time period during which a person is known to have been alive or known to have been notably active, when dates of birth and/or death are not known.
What part of speech is floruit?
Floruit can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce floruit?
Floruit is pronounced /ˈflɔɹ(j)uɪt/ (US).

Words near floruit in the dictionary

  1. Floros
  2. florosenine
  3. Florrie
  4. flors
  5. flortaucipir
  6. floruit
  7. floruits
  8. florula
  9. florulent
  10. flory
  11. Flory-Fox equation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: floruit (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-floruit.ogg.

Cite this entry: “floruit.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/floruit. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.