largum

Latin largus (of which largum is the neuter accusative form) described someone or something that gave freely and abundantly. The word appears in Cicero to mean generous and in Ovid to mean copious or plentiful, but it never primarily referred to physical size. Its Proto-Indo-European root is disputed: some connect it to a root meaning loose or slack, also visible in Greek lagaros (loose), while others link it to a root meaning to pour out or to bestow. Whatever its ultimate origin, the classical Latin sense was one of generative excess, too much given freely.

The word reached Old French as 'large,' which still carried the original sense of generous and open-handed. A 'large' person in twelfth-century French was one who gave without counting the cost, as much a moral description as a physical one. By the time 'large' entered Middle English in the thirteenth century, it could still mean liberal or free-handed as well as of great extent. Chaucer uses 'large' in both senses — the generous soul and the broad space — within a few decades of each other.

The shift to purely physical size in English was gradual and complete only by the sixteenth century. As the moral sense faded, only the idea of excess in magnitude remained. The Latin roots still show in 'largesse,' a Middle English borrowing from Old French 'largesse' (generosity, munificence), which preserved the original ethical meaning intact. When nobles scattered largesse over crowds at ceremonies, they were using the word exactly as Cicero would have recognized.

'At large' keeps a third thread of the original meaning alive: it means free, unconfined, not restricted to a space. The connection is to the Latin sense of loose, unchecked, beyond ordinary bounds. A criminal at large and a writer writing at large both carry something of the Latin largus: outside the usual limits, given over to excess or freedom. The phrase is one of the surviving places where English uses 'large' as a condition rather than a measurement.