The Ave Maria: the Hail Mary in Latin, Word by Word

The Ave Maria is the Hail Mary in Latin: seven short lines, and a lesson in the ablative. Gratia plena is full with grace, not a genitive. Along the way the prayer drops its verbs, makes two participles agree across genders, and ends on a genitive that only the endings can untangle.

The text

Ave Maria, gratia plena,

Dominus tecum.

Benedicta tu in mulieribus,

et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,

ora pro nobis peccatoribus,

nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

The prayer is two texts joined:

The second half circulated in several wordings in the Middle Ages before the Roman Breviary of 1568 settled the one above. Two names are not in Luke: Maria in the first line and Iesus after tui. Both were added in the Middle Ages.

Ave Maria

Ave is an imperative, from aveo, be well. It is what one Roman said to another in the street, the same ave as in Ave, Caesar. Latin greets people by giving them an order.

Maria is vocative: she is being addressed. First-declension nouns have the same form in the vocative and nominative, so only the sense shows it:

• Ave, Maria. - Hail, Mary.

Gratia plena: full with grace

Plena is feminine nominative, agreeing with Maria. Gratia is the word to watch: it is ablative, the thing she is filled with.

Both are good Latin, and classical writers use both; the Vulgate itself has the genitive in John 1:14, plenum gratiae et veritatis, full of grace and truth. This prayer has the ablative, and English full of grace hides it behind an of. The Sanctus has the same construction:

• Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. - Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

The ablative article has the case's other jobs.

Dominus tecum: no verb needed

Dominus tecum has no verb: the Lord is with you. Latin leaves est out freely, and English has to put it back.

Tecum is cum plus te, with the preposition fixed to the end. Latin does this with every personal pronoun:

You hear the last one at every mass: Dominus vobiscum, the Lord be with you.

Blessed: two participles

Benedicta and benedictus are the perfect passive participle of benedico, speak well of, bless. Each agrees with its own noun, and again there is no verb:

Same word, two genders: the ending alone says who is meant.

In mulieribus is in plus the ablative plural of mulier, among women. Classical Latin would say inter mulieres; the Vulgate of Luke 1:28 copies the Greek en gynaixin. The phrase means the most blessed of women.

Fructus ventris tui is a genitive chain:

Tui is the adjective your, not the pronoun of you. Iesus then names the fruit, in the nominative.

Holy Mary, pray for us

Ora is a first-conjugation imperative, so it is the bare stem, like ama. Peccatoribus stands beside nobis in the same case: pro nobis peccatoribus, for us sinners. On its own it could be dative or ablative; the pro in front settles it.

Mater Dei gives the sense of the title the Greek Church calls Theotokos, God-bearer; the closer Latin is Dei Genetrix.

The hour of our death

The last line is the best one for a learner, because only the endings show what goes with what:

Hora and mors are both feminine, so gender cannot help; case does. Nostrae is genitive, so it goes with mortis: the hour of our death. With hora it would have to be ablative, nostra.

Saying it

At mass, use Church Latin; this course's audio speaks classical. The pronunciation lesson has every rule.

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Say the prayer in Church Latin, then find every ablative in it.
2. Write mecum, tecum, nobiscum from memory.
3. Go on to the Gloria and the Sanctus, where gloria tua is the same ablative, and back to the Pater Noster for the commands.