Definition
A Latin adjective meaning "grievous" or "great," used in classical legal Latin to modify nouns describing injury, damage, or severity. Gravis does not appear as a standalone legal term but functions as a qualifying word within Latin phrases that appear in common law pleading and legal records. The most familiar such phrase is ad grave damnum ("to the grievous damage"), which appeared in older writs and pleadings to characterize the magnitude of harm suffered by the plaintiff.
The term carries a sense of weight and seriousness — that which is grave, heavy, or not trivial. In legal context, it signals that the harm or wrong being described rises above the merely inconvenient.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Gravis" is not a living English word in ordinary modern usage. It survives primarily in medical terminology, as in myasthenia gravis (a neuromuscular condition), where it retains the Latin sense of "grave" or "serious."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not entered as an English word; treated as Latin.
The gap matters for researchers: encountering gravis in a legal document does not signal a medical or technical reference. In law, it is a qualifying adjective embedded in Latin phrases — its significance is to intensify the characterization of damage or injury, not to serve as a term of art in its own right.
Common Confusion
Gravis should not be confused with its comparative form gravius or its cognate grave (English). Burrill's entry compounds potential confusion by including under the same headword a distinct Latin legal term — Gravius or Gravia — referring to an old European official title (a chief magistrate or officer), derived from the German grafio and used in compound titles such as Margravius (Margrave), Rheingravius (Rhinegrave), and Landgravius (Landgrave). These are entirely separate concepts. A researcher encountering "Gravius" in a medieval European legal source is reading about an office of governance, not about severity of harm.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter gravis not as a headword to look up but embedded within Latin phrases in early common law pleading materials, writ forms, and Year Book records. The phrase ad grave damnum is the primary vehicle. Understanding that gravis simply means "grievous" or "serious" prevents misreading those phrases as technical terms requiring independent definition.
Two traps worth noting:
First, Burrill's entry introduces the Gravius/Gravia official-title material under the same headword, which can send a researcher down an unrelated path. The magistrate-title usage belongs to medieval German and continental European institutional history, not to common law pleading.
Second, because gravis is a Latin adjective that inflects by case and gender, researchers may encounter it in variant forms (gravi, gravem, gravius) without immediately recognizing the connection to the same root concept. Gravius, in particular, is the comparative form ("more grievous") as well as the distinct official-title term in Burrill — context is necessary to distinguish them.
For corpus researchers, phrases containing gravis often appear in the formal recital portions of writs and declarations where the pleader was required to characterize the seriousness of harm. Tracing those phrases helps map the evolution of damage pleading conventions.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Bouvier's, and Burrill's — agree precisely on the core definition: "grievous; great," with ad grave damnum as the illustrative phrase and 11 Coke 40 as the shared citation anchor. The uniformity suggests the dictionaries were drawing from a common source tradition rather than independent analysis, which is typical for short Latin-term entries of this kind.
Burrill's stands apart by appending the extended Gravius/Gravia material on official titles, which the other dictionaries omit entirely. Whether this reflects Burrill's broader scope or an editorial choice to consolidate related-looking headwords is unclear, but it is not an error — it is a different term receiving incidental treatment under a similar spelling.
None of the historical dictionaries provide substantive doctrinal analysis of how gravis functioned in pleading or what legal consequences flowed from its use. The entries are definitional only.