Definition
To formally present facts alleging an injury, wrong, or offense to a court or officer with jurisdiction over the matter. In civil practice, the plaintiff complains of the defendant by setting out the basis for the claim in the initial pleading. In criminal or quasi-criminal practice, to complain is to charge a person with the commission of an offense before a magistrate or other authorized officer, initiating the process by which that charge will be examined or prosecuted. The act of complaining, in its legal sense, is the foundational step that invokes judicial or quasi-judicial authority.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To express feelings of pain, dissatisfaction, or resentment; also, to make a formal accusation or bring a formal charge.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To give utterance to expressions of grief, pain, censure, or regret; to lament, murmur, or find fault. Webster's also captures the formal sense: "To make a formal accusation; to make a charge."
The gap between common and legal usage is narrow but consequential. In everyday speech, "complain" almost always carries the informal sense of expressing dissatisfaction — grumbling, finding fault. In legal usage, the word is stripped of its emotional register entirely. To complain in court means to formally represent facts and invoke jurisdiction. A researcher encountering "the plaintiff complains" in a historical pleading should read that as a term of art signaling the operative charge or claim, not as description of a party's emotional state.
Common Confusion
COMPLAIN / COMPLAINT / PLAINTIFF: These three terms share a root and are closely linked but should not be conflated. To complain is the act; a complaint is the instrument or document resulting from that act; the plaintiff (from the Old French complaindre) is the party who complains. In some historical pleading forms, especially at common law, these connections are explicit in the text itself ("the plaintiff complains that..."), but modern practice has largely standardized the document label "complaint" without requiring the word "complains" in the body. Researchers should note that in criminal practice, the "complaint" and the "information" or "indictment" are distinct instruments, even though all originate from the act of complaining.
Why It Matters in Research
The verb complain is most useful to researchers as a signpost in historical pleading documents. At common law, the formulaic phrase "the plaintiff complains" was the standard opening of a declaration, signaling the beginning of the substantive allegation. When reading older case files, writs, or transcribed pleadings, encountering this phrase tells you precisely where the operative facts begin.
In criminal records, the act of complaining before a justice of the peace or magistrate was the initiating step in summary proceedings and many misdemeanor prosecutions. Historical court records — particularly at the local level — may describe a proceeding as having been commenced "on the complaint of" a named individual, which identifies the complaining witness and the procedural posture of the case.
Researchers working across jurisdictions should be aware that the formality and procedural significance of the complaint varies considerably. Federal civil practice and most modern state systems treat the complaint as the primary initiating pleading (replacing the common law declaration), while criminal practice maintains a distinct complaint form used at the magistrate or initial appearance stage, separate from the charging instrument used at trial.
The term itself rarely poses interpretive difficulty, but its derivatives — particularly complaint and complainant — require care in historical sources where usage was less standardized.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief and precise: to complain is to "represent facts constituting a supposed injury or offence, to a court or officer having jurisdiction; to charge a person with the commission of some injury or offence." Burrill correctly identifies two contexts — civil representation of injury and criminal charging — and grounds both in the concept of jurisdictional invocation. His Latin cross-reference to queri is useful for researchers working in Latin legal texts or early common law records, where the corresponding verb appears in writs and pleading forms.
Burrill's entry does not address the procedural instrument that results from the act of complaining, nor does it distinguish the complaint from related criminal instruments such as the information or indictment. For those distinctions, researchers must turn to entries under those headings.
Webster's 1913, notably, preserves both the informal and formal senses side by side, with the Shakespeare citation ("Now, Master Shallow, you'll complain of me to the king") illustrating that even in literary English the formal, accusatory sense was well understood. This confirms that the legal term was not artificially technical — it drew on a recognized register of the word — but that over time the informal sense has come to dominate common usage, widening the gap for modern readers.