First page of a 2014 US federal indictment
22 March 2023
The verb to indict and the noun indictment have, what on first blush seems like, a straightforward etymology but that in actuality is rather muddled. And, of course, like a lot of English words they have a weird spelling. The verb means to formally accuse and bring legal charges against someone for a crime, and the noun is the result of that action.
Like many legal terms, it is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman French, in this case enditer and enditement. And the legal sense appears in Anglo-Norman writing in the mid twelfth century. But that sense is unknown in Continental Old French, where the verb only means to write, indicate, make known, or instruct. These non-legal senses are also found in Anglo-Norman, but the legal sense appears to be unique to Britain. The French words are from the Latin verb dictare, meaning to say or declare.
It's clear the legal sense developed in Britain among the Norman overlords, who of course administered just following the Conquest. But the more general senses, those found on the Continental Old French, do not appear in extant Anglo-Norman writing until the thirteenth century. One might conclude that the legal sense appeared first in Britain, but the precedent in the written record is probably due to the fact that legal records have been preserved better than other writing. The more general senses were all probably brought across the Channel in 1066, but we just don’t have records of their early use in Britain.
Complicating things further, there is a Latin verb indictare, meaning to charge with a crime, but this word only appears in Anglo-Latin and dates to the early twelfth century. We cannot, from this distance, tell if the Anglo-Norman enditer came first and the Anglo-Latin indictare is a borrowing from that, or vice versa. The Anglo-Norman appears in the record some fifty years earlier, but that’s not conclusive. Large gaps in the records of medieval usage are common.
English use of the words is recorded in the early fourteenth century. they appear in Robert Mannyng’s poem Handlyng Synne, composed ca. 1303, in a discussion of Ten Commandments. Lines 1335–38 of the poem read:
what shul we sey of þys dytours,
Þys fals men, þa beyn sysours,
Þat, for hate, a trewman wyl endyte,
And a þefe for syluer quyte?(What shall we say these accusers,
These false men, that are jurymen,
But for hate will indict a true man,
And for silver will free a thief.)
Later in poem (line 8913), Mannying also uses the noun endytement.
Earlier Middle English spellings follow the Anglo-Norman and Mannyng’s form, with an initial < e > and without a < c >. The Latin indictare begins to influence the English spelling in the mid fifteenth century when the < i > spelling begins to appear. And the < c > starts to be inserted in the early seventeenth century, probably by spelling reformers with too much zeal for following Latin models. It is at this point that the spellings of indict and indictment become firmly ensconced in legal writing, not to be dislodged even though they do not resemble the word’s pronunciations.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2022, s.v., enditer, v., endite, n., enditement, n. https://anglo-norman.net/
Mannyng, Robert (Robert de Brunne). Robert of Brunne’s “Handlyng Synne” (ca. 1303), 2 vols. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society. London: K. Paul. Trench, Trübner, 1901 and 1903, lines 1335–38, 48. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v., enditen, v., enditement, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v., indict, v.1, indictment, n.
Image credit: US Department of Justice, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.