This is a list of Roman nomina. The nomen identified all free Roman citizens as members of individual gentes, originally families sharing a single nomen and claiming descent from a common ancestor. Over centuries, a gens could expand from a single family to a large clan, potentially including hundreds or even thousands of members. Some of these may have been the descendants of freedmen or persons who entered the gens through adoption, while in other cases, different families that had assumed the same nomen in the distant past became confused with one another, and came to be regarded as a single gens.