Definition
An adverb of degree used in legal pleadings, jury instructions, and damages language to indicate that an injury, harm, or wrong occurred to a substantial or significant extent. In legal contexts, "greatly" most often appears in personal injury pleadings and jury instructions modifying words such as "injured," "wounded," or "suffered." Its legal significance lies less in what it means on its own than in the problems it creates when used carelessly in instructions to a jury.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To a great extent or degree; nobly or magnanimously.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): In a great degree; much. Also: nobly, illustriously, magnanimously.
The gap between common and legal usage is procedural rather than definitional. In ordinary English, "greatly" is a routine intensifier carrying no particular weight. In legal proceedings, its repeated use in a jury instruction can constitute reversible error — not because the word means something different, but because its deployment by a judge signals a view of the facts that invades the jury's province.
Common Confusion
"Greatly" should not be confused with terms of legal art that establish threshold requirements for recovery or liability, such as "substantial," "material," or "serious." Unlike those terms, which courts have sometimes treated as carrying defined legal meaning in specific contexts, "greatly" has not developed a stable legal definition. Its danger in jury instructions is precisely that it suggests a severity threshold — jurors may infer that recovery requires great injury — without that threshold being legally sanctioned. Researchers should not assume that historical use of "greatly" in a charge or instruction was intentional or authoritative.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "greatly" in historical pleadings, charges to the jury, or appellate opinions should treat it as a flag term rather than a neutral modifier. Its presence in an instruction challenged on appeal almost always signals an argument that the trial court improperly commented on the evidence or created a misleading threshold in the minds of jurors.
The specific trap in historical sources: older pleading forms routinely stacked intensifiers — "greatly injured," "greatly wounded," "greatly suffered" — as formulaic language carried over from common law pleading conventions. What was once a stock phrase of pleading boilerplate became, over time, a target for appellate challenge when those same phrases migrated into jury instructions, where they carry greater risk of prejudice. A researcher pulling historical form books will find "greatly" used without concern; a researcher pulling appellate records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onward will find it contested.
The corpus connection: the Kentucky case flagged by Bouvier illustrates a transition point. Courts began distinguishing between permissible pleading language and impermissible instruction language during this era. When researching damages instructions in personal injury cases in historical sources, encountering "greatly" should prompt a search for parallel appellate treatment in the same jurisdiction.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is terse on this term, addressing it exclusively through the lens of jury instruction error. The entry does not define "greatly" as a term of art but instead warns of its misuse. Bouvier's treatment is practical and jurisdiction-specific — drawn from a single Kentucky appellate ruling — and should not be read as a general common law rule. The entry is useful as a pointer to the category of problem (impermissible judicial comment on evidence through charged language in instructions) rather than as a doctrinal statement applicable across jurisdictions.
No other major historical legal dictionaries treat "greatly" as a standalone entry, which itself signals something: the word carries no independent doctrinal content and warrants attention only in the context of the documents in which it appears.
Jurisdictional Note
Bouvier's source authority is limited to Kentucky. Whether repeated use of "greatly" in jury instructions constitutes reversible error in other jurisdictions depends on the applicable standard for reviewing jury charges and the scope of the judicial comment-on-evidence doctrine in each forum.