The noun panna is documented mainly in Latin graffiti, in an area covering Hispania, Gaul, Germania Superior, Noricum, and Britannia. In Roman times, this lexeme (the ancestor of English pan and German Pfanne) is only known from epigraphic sources. This fact, combined with the word’s territorial distribution, has led to a debate about its etymology, with the predominant hypothesis being that panna is a corruption of Classical Latin patĭna or a uox peregrina - or more specifically, a Celtic loan. This debate, which has been active since the beginning of the 20th century, is still unresolved, and references to the matter are scattered across many publications. In the present paper, we present the status quaestionis regarding this lexicological issue, reconstruct the history of the word panna from antiquity to the present day, and correct the pertinent article of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, published in 1984. We conclude that interpreting the form panna as a vulgarism - and possibly as a regionalism - is more plausible than viewing it as a Celtic loan.
Silvia Tantimonaco (Fri,) studied this question.