Definition
A Latin phrase meaning "at different times" or "at various times." Used in legal pleading and drafting to allege or describe acts, payments, transactions, or events that occurred on multiple separate occasions rather than in a single continuous instance. The extended form *diversis diebus et vicibus* — "at different days and times" — appears with similar frequency and carries the same distributive sense, emphasizing both the temporal spacing and the repeated character of the conduct or obligation at issue.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a term of pleading art, not a substantive legal concept, and researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in older common law pleadings, writs, and reports from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Its function is procedural precision: allegations framed with *diversis vicibus* signal that the pleader is not confining the claim to a single identified occasion, which broadens the evidentiary scope of the charge or demand.
Two research traps are worth flagging. First, the phrase is easily skipped as decorative Latin boilerplate when it is actually doing load-bearing work in the pleading — particularly in actions for debt, assumpsit, trespass, and nuisance, where the number and timing of discrete acts could affect the measure of damages or the statute of limitations analysis. Second, because it appears in abbreviated or condensed form in older reports and registers, researchers working from digitized sources may miss it if relying on keyword searches alone; variant spellings and contractions are common in manuscript and early print sources.
The related phrase *diversis diebus et vicibus* intensifies the allegation by specifying days as well as times, and its appearance in pleadings should prompt the researcher to consider whether the underlying claim rests on a pattern of conduct rather than a single event — a distinction with ongoing relevance when reading older precedents forward into modern doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the essential reference, defining the phrase as "at different times" and citing the Registrum Originale (Reg. Orig. 272) and Hobart's Reports (Hob. 189a) as primary authorities, with the compound form *diversis diebus et vicibus* supported by a citation to 13 East 407. These sources place the phrase firmly within the English common law pleading tradition. Burrill offers no extended analysis, which is appropriate: the term is a formula, not a doctrine, and the historical dictionaries correctly treat it as such.
What the historical dictionary record does not address is how courts actually handled allegations made in this form — whether, for instance, a pleading using *diversis vicibus* could be attacked as insufficiently particular, or how the phrase interacted with rules requiring the statement of a certain day. Researchers needing that layer of analysis must move from dictionary sources to the pleading treatises of the period, particularly Chitty on Pleading, where the practical mechanics of time-and-occasion allegations receive fuller treatment.
No meaningful divergence exists among the historical sources on the core meaning of this phrase; it is consistently and narrowly glossed as a temporal distributive.
Jurisdictional Note
The phrase belongs to the English common law pleading tradition and appears in American sources wherever that tradition was received. Its practical significance is now largely historical; modern rules of civil procedure in both American and English courts do not require or regularly employ Latin pleading formulas, and *diversis vicibus* is not a term of art in contemporary drafting.