Definition
To formally charge a person with having committed a crime or punishable offense before a court, magistrate, or officer having jurisdiction to inquire into and act upon the charge. The person against whom the charge is made is called the accused.
Bouvier's draws a useful distinction: in its primary legal sense, to accuse means to prefer a charge before a competent tribunal or officer — a formal, procedural act. In a secondary, looser sense, it may mean simply to make a charge, not necessarily through formal legal process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To find fault with, blame, or censure; to charge someone with having committed a crime or offense; to make an accusation against someone.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Listed only as an obsolete form of accusation, attributed to Shakespeare — suggesting the verb form had already migrated almost entirely into legal usage by the nineteenth century.
In ordinary speech, one person can accuse another of anything — dishonesty, rudeness, a broken promise — with no legal mechanism involved. The legal term requires a competent forum: a court, magistrate, or officer with jurisdiction. A threat to accuse someone of a crime, or a private statement that someone committed one, may carry legal consequences (extortion, defamation) but does not itself constitute an accusation in the technical sense. Researchers reading older sources should be alert to this distinction, which historical dictionaries sometimes blur.
Common Confusion
ACCUSE vs. INDICT vs. CHARGE: These terms are frequently used interchangeably in nonlegal writing but carry distinct procedural meanings. To accuse is the broader act of formally attributing criminal conduct to a person before a competent authority. To indict refers specifically to the grand jury's formal finding and written accusation. To charge may refer to either the accusation itself or the specific offense alleged. In historical sources, accuse sometimes appears where modern practice would use charge or indict; context must govern interpretation.
ACCUSE vs. ARRAIGN: Arraignment is the procedure by which an accused is brought before a court to hear and respond to the charges — it follows accusation, it is not synonymous with it.
Why It Matters in Research
The procedural weight of accuse has shifted across time. In older common law sources and in some of the historical dictionary entries here, accuse carried a strict requirement: the charge had to be made before a tribunal with legal competence to act. By contrast, modern usage — including in some statutes and opinions — treats accuse more loosely, sometimes applying it to any formal charging instrument, including an information or indictment.
Researchers working with nineteenth-century criminal procedure materials should note that the competency of the forum was essential to whether an accusation existed at all. Bouvier's specifically flags that a charge before an incompetent officer may not rise to a legal accusation. This matters when tracing rights that attach upon accusation — including, in constitutional analysis, Sixth Amendment protections.
The fragment in Anderson's — "a threat to accuse of a crime does not refer to accusing by way of" — points toward extortion doctrine, where threatening to accuse was itself a criminal act under many statutes. This is a distinct corpus thread: researchers interested in blackmail and extortion history will find accuse appearing in that context with its own technical freight.
Jurisdictional variation in how accusation is formally initiated (grand jury indictment, prosecutor's information, magistrate's complaint) means that what triggers the accused's procedural rights differs by jurisdiction and era. The act of accusation is the hinge point for many downstream rights, so its precise meaning in any given source must be read against that source's procedural background.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four sources here are largely consistent on the core meaning — formal charge, competent forum — but differ in emphasis and scope.
Black's (both editions) stresses the formal and jurisdictional character of the act most sharply. The 2nd edition grounds the definition in case law, confirming that the term had hardened into a term of art by the early twentieth century.
Bouvier's is the most nuanced, preserving both the formal legal sense and a secondary informal sense backed by a Connecticut citation. This dual treatment is useful: it acknowledges that courts sometimes used accuse in contexts short of formal legal proceedings.
Anderson's introduces the verb's companion noun — accusation — and flags the extortion thread, though the entry is truncated in the available text. Anderson's also cross-references ACCUSARE, signaling the civil law tradition that ran parallel to the common law approach.
None of the historical sources address constitutional dimensions directly, which is the most significant gap. The Sixth Amendment's guarantee that "the accused shall enjoy the right" to various trial protections makes the moment of accusation constitutionally significant — a dimension entirely absent from these dictionary treatments.
Jurisdictional Note
Whether accusation is initiated by grand jury indictment, prosecutor's information, or complaint varies by jurisdiction and by the classification of the offense. Federal practice and most state felony practice historically required grand jury indictment; many states permit information for felonies and use complaint or citation for lesser offenses. The procedural rights that attach at accusation therefore differ accordingly.