Line drawing of ecce
Coloured illustration of ecce
#423 of 1,000Core 1000

Translation

behold, look; see here

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Examples

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Behold the man.

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Look, the king is coming.

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And there he was, standing in the middle of the road.

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Behold your mother and your brothers.

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And suddenly there was a great shout.

Ecce is an interjection, not a verb, and it governs nothing. The noun after it normally stands in the nominative, as in ecce homo; the accusative appears in comedy, where ecce fuses with pronouns to give eccum, eccam, eccos, "here he is, here she is".

It carries an outsized load in this corpus because the Vulgate uses it to render the Hebrew hinneh, the particle that opens hundreds of verses. Which is a warning: translate every one of them as "behold" and you produce something no English speaker has said since 1611. Often "look", "and there", or simply nothing reads better. Italian ecco and French voici and voilà do the same job today, and English took ecce only in the frozen phrase ecce homo.

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ecce: worksheet, infographic and listicle

Free printable study downloads for the Latin word "ecce" (behold, look; see here): a worksheet with the answer key built in, an infographic, and a sentence listicle. Open any one to view, print or save.

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This word is taught in chapter 5, lesson 3: ecce, umbra, quicumque and 7 more words.