ubi sunt

[ oo-bee soont ]

noun

1. a poetic motif emphasizing the transitory nature of youth, life, and beauty, found especially in Medieval Latin poems.

Word History and Origins

Origin of ubi sunt¹

1910–15; < Medieval Latin Ubi sunt ( quī ante nōs fuērunt? ) Where are (those who were before us?)

Example Sentences

Here we have Seidel’s ubi sunt poem, pondering where the titans go when the dawn breaks.

From The New Yorker

It is customary at this point to rage with ubi sunt zeal against the rise of the new world: the distractions of the new formats, the altered gravity of the roving global Twenty20 league, with its short-termist concerns, its stupefying riches, its greatness-skewering sense of dilution.

From The Guardian

On the one hand stands the human multitude, gathering rosebuds while it may, crying up and down the roads of the world to all who pass to rejoice today, for “ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuere?”

From Project Gutenberg

Exinde autem oriuntur dubia de modo concludendi laudes: nempe 1o Ubi sunt duo vel plures Presbyteri, alius debetne concludere Laudes dum celebrans qui officium inchoavit paratur in sacristia?

From Project Gutenberg

O grex, � nimium tanto Pastore beatus; O ubi sunt tanto pascua digna grege?

From Project Gutenberg