volvitāre

Meaning

1. Proto Romancereconstructionroll, turn

Origins

From *volvitus (“spun”) + -āre (verb-forming suffix), with early loss of unstressed /ĭ/. The form *volvitus would represent a 'vulgar' past participle for Latin volvere (“to spin”). Alternatively a direct phonetic development from the Classical frequentative volūtāre (> *vol(ŭ)tāre). It would be somewhat unusual, as this type of unstressed vowel reduction in the second syllable of tetrasyllabic paroxytones is generally counteracted in verbs due to analogy with proparoxytonic inflections (e.g. Latin volū́tat 'he rolls').