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In legal writing, a dictum (Latin 'something that has been said'; plural dicta) is a statement made by a court. It may or may not be binding as a precedent.
Obiter dictum (usually used in the plural, obiter dicta) is a Latin phrase meaning "said in passing", [1] that is, any remark in a legal opinion that is "said in passing" by a judge or arbitrator. It is a concept derived from English common law , whereby a judgment comprises only two elements: ratio decidendi and obiter dicta .
dictum factum: what is said is done: Motto of United States Navy Fighter Squadron VF-194. dictum meum pactum: my word [is] my bond: Motto of the London Stock Exchange. diem perdidi: I have lost the day: From the Roman Emperor Titus. Recorded in the biography of him by Suetonius in Lives of the Twelve Caesars. dies irae: Day of wrath
Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".
Examples are stewardi (supposed plural of stewardess) and Elvi (as a plural for Elvis imitators). The Toyota corporation has determined that their Prius model should have the plural form Prii, even though the Latin word prius has a plural priora, the Lada Priora having prior claim to that name—though the common plural is "Priuses".
For example, in Polish, the noun "oko", among other meanings, may refer to a human or animal eye or to a drop of oil on water. The plural of "oko" in the first meaning is "oczy" (even if actually referring to more than two eyes), while in the second it is "oka" (even if actually referring to exactly two drops).
(Notice the different singular, "gesserit", and plural, "gesserint", forms.) It was from this phrase that Frank Herbert extracted the name for the Bene Gesserit sisterhood in the Dune novels. quantocius quantotius: the sooner, the better: or, as quickly as possible quantum libet (q.l.) as much as pleases: medical shorthand for "as much as you wish"
Dictema (Latin: dico, dixi, dictum – "I say, I state") is an elementary situational-thematic unit of a text, formed of one or more sentences as units of the immediately lower level of language segments. [1]