Tumultum

Tumultum is the accusative singular of the Latin noun tumultus, which means uproar, confusion, or disturbance. Tumultus belongs to the fourth declension and is masculine in gender, with tumultum serving as the accusative form. In classical texts, tumultum commonly denotes a loud disorder in crowds, public assemblies, or military camps, and it can be used with verbs such as facere (“to make a tumult”) or excitare (“to incite a tumult”).

The etymology of tumultus is Latin, with Proto-Italic roots and possible cognates in other Indo-European languages; it is the source of the English noun tumult and of the Romance-language words tumulto/tumulto. The form tumultum itself reflects Latin case endings rather than a separate headword.

In modern usage, tumultum appears almost exclusively in Latin or academic discussions of Latin grammar and literature, where it is cited as an inflected form rather than a standalone lemma. Despite its obscurity outside scholarly contexts, the term helps illustrate how Latin encodes grammatical function through case endings and how related forms have given rise to cognate words in several languages.

Related terms include tumultus (the base form of the noun), and in some contexts the derived noun tumultuatio, as well as the English loanword tumult.