coepi

From earlier Old Latin coëpiō, coapiō, with a trisyllabic stem, from co- +‎ apiō (literally “to lay hold of something on different sides, to lay hold of”). Late Latin coepiō, with a disyllabic stem, is a back-formation.

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈkoe̯.piː]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈt͡ʃɛː.pi]

coepī (perfect infinitive coepisse, supine coeptum); third conjugation, no present stem

1. to have begun
   • c. 4 BCE – 65 CE, Seneca the Younger, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium 47.12:

     “At ego,” inquis, “nūllum habeō dominum.” Bona aetās est: forsitan habēbis. Nescīs quā aetāte Hecubā servīre coeperit, quā Croesus, quā Dārēī māter, quā Platōn, quā Diogenēs?

     “But I have no master,” you say. Your age is appropriate: perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at what age Hecuba began to be enslaved; or Croesus; or (Sisygambis), the mother of Darius; or Plato; or Diogenes?
     (Third-person singular perfect active subjunctive of coepī used here in an indirect question following nescīs.)

2. (uncommon) to begin

• A defective verb in Classical Latin, with incipiō (“to begin”) generally used as a substitute for the present tense. Fully-conjugated coepiō (“to begin”) is attested Late Latin.
• Occasionally, the perfect forms are used with a present-tense meaning; compare nōvī and ōdī.

• recoepī

• coeptō

• Late Latin: coepiō

coepī

1. first-person singular perfect active indicative of coepiō

• “coepi”, in Gaffiot, Félix (1934), Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
• Carl Meißner; Henry William Auden (1894), Latin Phrase-Book‎^[1], London: Macmillan and Co.
  • he fell ill: aegrotare coepit
    
  • a man's credit begins to go down: fides aliquem deficere coepit
    
• De Vaan, Michiel (2008), “apīscor”, in Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 7), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 47