Word.ws English Dictionary

nomina

nomina is the plural of nomen.

Meaning of nomen

Noun

nomen (plural nomina or nomens)

  1. (historical) The family name of an Ancient Roman, designating their gens.
    • The Romans evolved a quite different system of nomenclature, which in its classical form consisted of three names, the praenomen (e.g. Marcus), nomen (e.g. Tullius), and cognomen (e.g. Cicero), and two other designations (the name of the father and of the tribe): […]1945, E[lizabeth] G[idley] Withycombe, “Introduction”, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, →OCLC, page xiv
  2. (historical) The birth name of a pharaoh, the fifth of the five names of the royal titulary, traditionally encircled by a cartouche and preceded by the title zꜣ-rꜥ.
    • The adytum is unsculptured, but two monoliths within it bear the name of Physcon and Cleopatra; and in the front chamber of the naos is that of the Ethiopian king “Ashar (Atar)-Amun*, the everliving,” who in some of his nomens is called “the beloved of Isis.”1843, [John] Gardner Wilkinson, Modern Egypt and Thebes: Being a Description of Egypt; Including the Information Required for Travellers in That Country, volume II, London: John Murray, […], page 308
  3. A taxonomic name.
    • Over the decades and centuries, Linnaeus’s binominal system reached ever greater prominence as a standard to categorize and stabilize organismal biology, and it became necessary to trace taxon names, so that duplication and confusion could be addressed or avoided. As a consequence, different areas...2023, Wolfgang Denzer, Hinrich Kaiser, “Naming And Gaming: The Illicit Taxonomic Practice Of 'Nomenclatural harvesting' And How To Avoid It”, in Journal of Zoology, volume 320, number 3, page 161

Phrases with nomina

12 more phrasesFewer phrases

Questions about nomina

What is nomina the plural of?
Nomina is the plural of nomen.

Words near nomina in the dictionary

  1. nomically
  2. NOMID
  3. nomifensine
  4. nomikai
  5. nomilin
  6. nomina
  7. nomina abstracta
  8. nomina acti
  9. nomina actionis
  10. nomina agenti
  11. nomina agentis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nomina (page history and authors); nomen (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “nomina.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nomina. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.