activum

Activum is a term with historical and specialized uses in Latin and in modern accounting terminology. In Latin, activum is a neuter noun formed from the adjective activus, meaning “active.” It appears in some antiquity and medieval texts to denote the active thing, the active side of a process, or a component that performs an action. In philosophical and scholastic contexts, activum is used at times to refer to the active aspect or agentive element of a sequence, though the more common technical term for “act” is actus, and activum is not a consistently fixed label across authors or periods.

In modern accounting and bookkeeping, activum has a more concrete role in certain European languages. It denotes assets—resources controlled by an entity as a result of past events that are expected to bring future economic benefits. In those usages, activum sits on the asset side of the balance sheet and is often contrasted with passivum or with liabilities on the opposite side. The term is typically encountered in multilingual texts or historical documents; in English-language accounting, the standard term is assets, and Latin forms are generally not used in everyday practice. In German-language contexts, the corresponding concept is Aktiva, with the singular form Aktivum appearing in some older or more technical writings.

Etymologically, activum derives from Latin activus, meaning “active,” and the noun form reflects its role as the thing that is active or that embodies activity. The word’s relevance today is mainly historical, with limited use in specialized multilingual or disciplinary contexts.