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Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire.

All Romance languages descend from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was a lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, being eventually replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th.

Latin remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, which includes being the official national language of the Vatican.

Latin has an extensive flectional system, which mainly operates by appending strings to a fixed stem. Inflection of nouns and adjectives is termed "declension", that of verbs, "conjugation". There are five declensions of nouns, and four conjugations for verbs. The six noun forms (or "cases") are nominative (used for subjects and predicate nominatives), genitive (show possession), dative (indirect objects), accusative (direct objects, some prepositions), ablative (used with some prepositions), and vocative (used to address someone). In addition, there exists in some nouns a locative case used to express place (normally expressed by the ablative with a preposition such as IN), but this hold-over from Indo-European is only found in the names of lakes, cities, towns, similar locales, and a few other words.

The Romance languages are not derived from Classical Latin but rather from the spoken Vulgar Latin. Latin and Romance differ (for example) in that Romance had distinctive stress whereas Latin had distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants and stress, in Spanish only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive.

English grammar is not a direct derivative of Latin grammar. Attempts to make English grammar fit Latin rules — such as the contrived prohibition against the split infinitive — have not worked successfully in regular usage. However, as many as half the words in English come to us through Latin, including many words of Greek origin first adopted by the Romans, not to mention the thousands of French, Spanish, and Italian words of Latin origin that have also enriched English.

During the 16th and on through the 18th century English writers created huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots. These words, dubbed "inkpot" words (as if they had spilled from an pot of ink), were rich in flavor and meaning. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some remain. Imbibe, Extrapolate, and Inebriation are all "inkpot" terms carved from Latin and Greek Words.

Vademecum in opus Saxonis et alia opera Danica compendium ex indice verborum

Dictionnaire de Robert Estienne - "Dictionnaire francois-latin, autrement dict les mots francois, avec les manieres d'user d'iceulx, tournez en latin" de Robert Estienne, XVIème siècle, chez Gallica.

Glossarium Gallico-Latinum - L'ouvrage est du XVème siècle, se trouve à Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. lat. 7684. La publication a été assurée par le projet REFLEX (Research in Early French Lexicography)

Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898)

Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis - Le dictionnaire unilingue de Du Cange, XVIIème siècle, chez Gallica

Latin pour grands débutants - Dictionnaire latin-français complet, à consulter en ligne ou à télécharger. Textes et traductions de César, Cicéron, Phèdre, Lhomond. Cours et grammaire.

Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid

Latin-English-Latin Dictionary (Perseus Project)

Latin-Portuguese Dictionary

Le Catholicon - Rédigé en 1464 par Jehan Lagadeuc, le Catholicon serait le premier dictionnaire trilingue au monde (breton-français-latin)

Le grand dictionnaire françois-latin - Ouvrage de Guillaume Poille, 1614, publié par Gallica au format PDF.

Lexique latin-français - Dictionnaire latin-français complet, à consulter en ligne ou à télécharger. Des liens vers la version numérisée du "Quicherat" sont disponibles

Petit lexique Latin-Francais - Lexique orienté vers les noms propres, les métiers, et tout ce qui facilite la lecture des documents paroissiaux

Spanish - Latin   Latin - Spanish

Vocabularius Familiaris et Compendiosus - L'ouvrage est de Guillaume Le Talleur, Rouen, 1490; la publication a été réalisée par le projet REFLEX (Research in Early French Lexicography)