Definition
A silver coin of the United States equal in value to ten cents, or one-tenth of a dollar. In legal contexts, the term appears primarily in statutes and instruments where precise denomination of currency is at issue — for example, in penalty clauses, fee schedules, bond conditions, or contracts specifying payment in United States coin. The dime has no independent doctrinal significance as a legal concept; its legal relevance is strictly monetary and denominational.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A ten-cent coin. In informal slang, "to dime" means to inform on someone to the authorities, especially anonymously; also, in music contexts, to run an amplifier at maximum output ("dimed").
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A silver coin of the United States of the value of ten cents, the tenth of a dollar. Also associated with the "dime novel," a cheap sensational paperback sold for ten cents.
The legal and common meanings are essentially identical for the noun form: a ten-cent coin. The informal verb usage — "to dime" meaning to inform on someone — carries no recognized legal meaning and should not be imported into legal research contexts. A researcher encountering "dime" in historical instruments or statutes is dealing with the coin, not the slang.
Common Confusion
DIME (the slang verb) vs. DIME (the coin): In contemporary informal usage, "to dime" or "diming someone out" means to inform on them — a usage that has appeared in criminal law contexts colloquially (in reported speech, testimony transcripts, or police reports) but carries no legal definition. Researchers encountering the verb form in legal documents should treat it as vernacular, not as a term of art.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are unlikely to encounter DIME as a standalone legal concept, but the term appears in historical legal instruments with some regularity in two specific situations.
First, in early American statutes, bond conditions, and fee schedules, payments were often itemized by denomination. A document requiring payment of "one dime" or "ten dimes" is specifying coin, not a legal standard. Researchers reading pre-Civil War instruments should be alert to the distinction between specie payments (actual coin) and paper money obligations, which had different legal treatment — particularly during periods of suspension of specie payment and under the Legal Tender Acts of the 1860s.
Second, in older legal instruments the word "dime" may appear in contexts involving the computation of fractional dollar amounts. Because early American monetary law was careful about denomination (reflecting concerns about coin debasement and the constitutional framework for currency), precision in reading these references matters.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation in the legal meaning of "dime" as a coin denomination — it is fixed by federal monetary law.
Researchers should also be aware that the Rapalje & Lawrence entry nominally associated with this term in some digitized sources is clearly a scanning or indexing artifact: the text reproduced under "DIME" in that dictionary is in fact a portion of the entry for DIGEST or a neighboring term, and bears no relationship to the coin. This is a corpus contamination issue. Do not treat that Rapalje & Lawrence passage as substantive legal content on DIME.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) define DIME identically and tersely: "A silver coin of the United States, of the value of ten cents, or one-tenth of a dollar." Both editions immediately follow the entry with DIMIDIA, DIMIDIUM, DIMIDIUS (Latin terms meaning "half"), suggesting the alphabetical proximity of these Latin terms accounts for their inclusion near DIME. This is not a cross-reference — it is simply a formatting artifact of dictionary organization.
The historical dictionaries offer nothing beyond the monetary definition, which is appropriate: there is no legal doctrine built around the dime as distinct from other currency. The coin's significance in legal texts is strictly instrumental.