Eclipsis lunam tegit.

Latin usually shows this with case endings, not mainly with word order.

• eclipsis is the subject.
• lunam is the direct object because -am is a very common accusative singular ending.
• tegit is singular, so the subject is singular too.

So the structure is essentially:

• eclipsis = subject
• lunam = object
• tegit = verb

Because lunam is the accusative singular form of luna.

The dictionary form is luna, but when the word is used as a direct object, first-declension nouns normally change to -am in the singular:

• luna = nominative singular
• lunam = accusative singular

Since the moon is the thing being covered, Latin uses lunam.

tegit is:

• 3rd person singular
• present tense
• active voice
• indicative mood

It comes from the verb tego, tegere.

The ending -it here tells you he/she/it. So tegit means he/she/it covers, or in English sometimes is covering, depending on context.

You would look it up under tego.

Latin verbs are normally listed by their 1st person singular present form in dictionaries, so:

• sentence form: tegit
• dictionary form: tego

A learner should get used to working backward from the ending to the dictionary form.

Because Latin has many singular nouns whose nominative form ends in -is, especially in the third declension.

So -is does not automatically mean plural.

In this sentence, eclipsis is a singular nominative noun. Its ending may look unusual if you are expecting only patterns like -a, -us, or -um, but third-declension nouns are more varied.

It is a real Latin word, but it is also a Greek loanword. That is one reason its form may look less familiar to beginners.

Even so, its job in the sentence is straightforward: here it is the subject.

Because Classical Latin does not have articles like English the or a/an.

Latin often leaves that idea to the context. So a noun like lunam can mean:

• the moon
• a moon

depending on the situation. In a sentence like this, English normally uses the moon, but Latin does not need a separate word for the.

It is common, but not required.

Latin often prefers to place the verb near the end of the sentence, so subject-object-verb is very natural:

• Eclipsis lunam tegit

But Latin word order is more flexible than English because the endings already show the grammatical roles. You could rearrange the words and still keep the same basic meaning, though the emphasis might change.

Yes. Because the ending already means he/she/it, tegit can by itself mean it covers.

However, without eclipsis, you would not know what is doing the covering unless the context already made that clear. Adding eclipsis tells you exactly what the subject is.