individuum

Individuum is a Latin noun meaning a single, particular entity. In English-language scholarship the form is usually found in historical, philosophical, or Latin-text contexts. The root comes from indivisus, “not divided,” but in practice individuum denotes a concrete thing—an individual person, animal, plant, or any discrete unit.

In philosophy, individuum has been used to mark the distinction between individuals and general terms such as genera and species. The topic of individuation concerns what makes a thing a single, distinct entity rather than a member of a broader class. Medieval and early modern thinkers, including scholastic writers, treated individuum as the concrete instance that bears unity and persistence through change. Related ideas, such as haecceity or “thisness,” were developed to explain how a thing can be the same object despite similarities to others of its kind.

In biology and related sciences, the term appears in Latin-language passages or in discussions that preserve traditional terminology. There it can refer to a single organism as an independent unit within a population. In modern English usage, the word has largely been supplanted by “individual,” though it remains encountered in historical texts, Latin quotations, or philosophical discourse.

Overall, individuum designates a particular, identifiable entity as opposed to a universal or class. The concept is closely tied to questions of identity, persistence, and what constitutes the boundary between one thing and another within a shared set of properties.