The corpus record — Latin

quidam

a certain

Generated live from the audited Latin corpus — every figure on this page is a database query, not prose from memory.

Where it lives

Ab Urbe Condita, books 8-10 - 15s 1 · 153.85/10k
Fragmenta 2 · 148.15/10k
Academica 31 · 63.66/10k
Divus Vespasianus 20 · 62.52/10k
Vitellius 12 · 49.85/10k
Divus Claudius 31 · 48.54/10k
Diadumenus Antoninus 8 · 47.9/10k
Institutio Oratoria 807 · 46.96/10k
De Tranquillitate Animi 35 · 46.33/10k
Pausanias 4 · 45.35/10k
Tiberius 41 · 45.09/10k
Otho 7 · 44.39/10k

Densest 12 of 305 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

quīdam — Lewis & Short

quīdam, quaedam, quoddam, and

I subst. quiddam, pron. indef., a certain, a certain one, somebody, something (v. aliquis init.): quidam ex advocatis, Cic. Clu. 63, 177: quidam de collegis nostris, id. Fam. 11, 21, 5: quaedam certa vox, id. de Or. 3, 12, 44: inopem quendam describere, id. Att. 7, 16: quodam tempore, a certain (indefinite) time, once upon a time, once, id. Fin. 5, 2, 4. — In plur., some: excesserunt urbe quidam, alii mortem sibi consciverunt, Liv. 45, 10: quaedam quaestiones, Cic. Top. 21, 79.—Also with gen.: quidam bonorum caesi, Tac. A. 1, 49: quibusdam Andriorum persuasit, etc., Liv. 31, 45, 7.— Often with an adj. to soften the assertion: timiditate quādam ingenuā, Cic. de Or. 2, 3, 10: qui virtutem duram et quasi ferream quandam esse volunt, id. Lael. 13, 48.—Subst.: quiddam, something; with gen.: quiddam mali, Cic. Leg. 3, 10, 23. — Without gen.: quiddam divinum, something divine, Cic. Ac. 1, 9, 33.— Plur.: quaedam, si credis consultis, mancipat usus, Hor. Ep. 2, 2, 159.

In the wild

quodam Bede, Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis Anglorum 3.22.p2
quidam Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 31.3.p6
quaedam Suetonius, Divus Augustus 87.1
quibusdam Seneca, De Beneficiis 3.30.4
quibusdam Jerome, Epistulae. Selections. 38.3
quidam Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.3.68

6 of 9,603 attestations shown.

Where it came from

Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine Treated in Ernout-Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine s.v. quidam (scan p. 580; entry #9519).

Latin text and lemmatization derived from the Perseus Digital Library (canonical-latinLit), CC BY-SA 4.0. Lewis & Short (public domain) via Perseus. This derived data is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license.