In music, a dictum (Latin 'something that has been said'; plural dicta) is a type of libretto for a church cantata consisting of quotes from sacred scripture.
When Erdmann Neumeister introduced the cantata concept for sacred music in early 18th-century Protestant Germany, his librettos originally had only two types of movements: recitatives and arias.
In Neumeister's original concept both of these types of movements were to be sung by vocal soloists.
Soon thereafter, for instance in a set of cantata librettos published in Meiningen in 1704, two other types of movements, both deriving from earlier genres such as Chorale concerto and Geistliches Konzert, were combined in the cantata librettos: chorales and dicta.
Libretto authors such as Neumeister and Benjamin Schmolck began to include dicta and chorales in their later cantata cycles.