octolingual

Written in eight languages.

In 1539 Estienne reversed his Dictionarium, a direct descendant of his own Latin Thesaurus, into the Dictionnaire that was the ancestor of Nicot’s French Thresor. He did this because when popular demand required a reprinting of the octolingual Calepin, Estienne found this work unacceptable and a willing revisor unavailable.

Makkai is the author of Cantio Nocturna Peregrini Aviumque [Nightsong of the Wanderer and the Birds], an octolingual book of poetry honoring Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 250 anniversary in 1999.

Characterized by the use or presence of eight languages.

The Doktor was in the highest dudgeon. He kept shouting "pigs, louts, goatherds" in several languages; then he exhausted his octolingual vocabulary on words like Communists, deviationists, Reactionaries, and Imperialist dogs.

When I visited Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories some months ago I learned that one of the towns in the north—I am sorry, I forget which one—declared itself octolingual, to represent all of the languages spoken including, I might add, English and French, and six different native languages in that particular small town.

Knowing eight languages.

Also an octolingual Yugoslavian who was a lieutenant in the French Foreign Legion and was imprisoned in Buchenwald during the war, a Berlin business man, an economics professor and a girl who was the private secretary for Dinah Shore for three years.

The faith he [Keshub Chunder Sen] preached was the Brahmo Samaj, founded in 1828 by the octolingual (Bengali, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Greek, Latin and Hebrew) scholar Raja Rammohun Roy.