Traditionally derived from locus (“place”) and pleō (“to fill”). However, Nussbaum (2016) rejects a connection to locus (“place”) for semantic reasons, namely that locus does not refer to possessed land in particular. He instead connects the element locu- with Indo-Iranian terms like Sanskrit राशि (rāśi, “quantity, heap, number”) and reconstructs Proto-Indo-European *loḱis as ancestral to the two, making a compound "abundance-filled" in Latin.