floruit

alternative abbreviation fl. · alternative abbreviation flor.

1. defectiverare except abbreviatedLived, flourished; used in biographies to indicate a time period during which a person is known to have been alive or known to have been notably active, when dates of birth and/or death are not known.

   Mīrā (Bai). Floruit 16th century. Rajasthan's most famous female saint and poetess of Kṛṣṇa bhakti.

   2003, Banāsā, Banasa: A Spiritual Autobiography, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, →ISBN, page 86

   2 more examples

   Marius Mercator must have shared the vigour of Alcimus, for he floruit in 218 according to Mr. Miller , while he at any rate existed in 418.

   1895, Arthur Cayley Headlam, The Church Quarterly Review, page 155

   J. Joyce (floruit 1850) In 1926 Svevo wrote a letter to James Joyce in Paris inquiring if he were related to the J. Joyce who in 1850 had had printed and published by Lloyd Austriaco in Trieste a book[...]

   1993 November 15, Joseph Cary, A Ghost in Trieste, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 230

plural floruits · alternative abbreviation fl. · alternative abbreviation flor.

1. The time period during which a person, group, culture, etc. is at its peak.

   1 more example

   Though Aristotle claimed that a human being reaches his intellectual peak at age forty-nine (Rhetoric 1390b9), chronologists reckon a person's flowering—his floruit—at about age forty. The mists of time have made the precise reckoning of chronology quite difficult. Sometimes, when a birth is not known, a floruit can be estimated on the basis of what is known about an individual's career.

   2005, James A. Arieti, Philosophy in the Ancient World, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page xxi

   Synonyms: flowering