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Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel
i didn't know quidam was used in english (at least in legalese english...).
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I don't think I've ever come across it in English either.
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it's used in french slang to mean "some guy". not so much now but it was still quite common in the 50s and probably later.
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And that is exactly what it means in Latin, of course; Latin doesn't have either definite or indefinite articles, so they used other words to perform the same functions that articles serve in other languages. "quidam" means "a certain" (eg "quidam homo" = "a certain man") and is used as a substitute for the indefinite article ("a man"). In medieval Latin, they started using the word for the number "one" instead (unus/una/unum) which is where French gets its indefinite article "un/une" from.