Definition
A Latin adverb meaning "by name" or "one by one by name." Used in legal writing to indicate that persons, things, or items are identified or designated individually and expressly, rather than by general description or class reference. When a document, statute, order, or judgment names parties or items nominatim, each is called out specifically — not swept in by implication or grouped under a broader category.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern English use; the term has no common civilian counterpart and is confined to legal, ecclesiastical, and academic contexts.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as a general English word; treated as a Latin borrowing used in formal and learned writing to mean "by name" or "naming each specifically."
The term has no meaningful gap to flag between common and legal usage because it never migrated into ordinary English. It remains untranslated Latin in legal contexts, functioning as a precise qualifier rather than a familiar word carrying a divergent technical meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
The practical stakes of nominatim designation appear most sharply in three research contexts.
First, in statutory and wills construction, courts have long distinguished between grants or bequests that name beneficiaries nominatim and those that describe a class. A nominatim designation typically controls over a general class description in the same instrument, and the presence or absence of individual naming can determine whether a person takes, is excluded, or falls into an ambiguity requiring extrinsic evidence.
Second, in equity and early common law pleading, injunctions, orders of outlawry, and excommunication proceedings required that defendants be named nominatim to bind them personally. Researchers working in chancery records, ecclesiastical court materials, or early criminal proceedings will encounter the term as a threshold jurisdictional marker — if the party was not named nominatim, the proceeding's reach over that individual could be challenged.
Third, in civil law materials and their reception into early American and English jurisprudence, nominatim pairs with demonstratio — the idea that a thing may be identified either by its proper name or by description of its body, trade, or office. Burrill's citation to Lord Ellenborough (12 East, 244) points researchers toward early nineteenth-century English case law where the civil law vocabulary of designation was being absorbed into common law evidentiary and contractual reasoning.
Trap for historical source users: older digests and abridgments frequently use nominatim without definition, assuming the reader's Latin literacy. In context it can look like a case name element or a party designation rather than a term of art. Read it as an adverbial qualifier modifying how parties or items were identified in the instrument or proceeding under discussion.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning — "by name" and "one by one" — with no substantive disagreement. The differences are in depth. Black's (both editions) treats the term tersely, as a simple Latin gloss requiring no elaboration. Burrill goes further and is the more useful source here: he grounds the term in the civil law tradition, links it to the concept of demonstratio (identification by description of body, trade, or office as an alternative to naming), cites Calvinus's Lexicon Juridicum as the doctrinal authority, and anchors it to English case law via Lord Ellenborough. This situates nominatim not as a stray Latinism but as part of a coherent civilian vocabulary for how legal acts acquire specificity and effect.
What the historical dictionaries collectively do not address is the term's procedural significance in equity and ecclesiastical practice — the requirement that orders bind named individuals. Researchers should not rely on the dictionary entries alone for that dimension and should consult treatises on chancery practice and ecclesiastical jurisdiction directly.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is encountered primarily in sources drawing on civil law tradition, English equity practice, and ecclesiastical proceedings. American jurisdictions that received civil law influence — particularly Louisiana and to some degree the early Southwest — will show nominatim in local statutes and judicial opinions more frequently than common law jurisdictions, where it tends to appear only in opinions engaging historical or civilian sources.