Definition
In legal usage, "ignore" carries three related but distinct senses:
1. To be unacquainted with or have no knowledge of a matter. This meaning is largely archaic in modern practice but appears in older pleadings and treatises where ignorance of a fact was a formal posture.
2. To willfully disregard or decline to take notice of something. A court, officer, or party who refuses to recognize a claim, order, or fact is said to ignore it in this sense.
3. To reject a bill of indictment. When a grand jury finds that the evidence presented by the prosecution is insufficient to support the charge, it ignores the bill — formally declining to return a true bill. This is the sense with the most durable technical importance in legal sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To deliberately not listen to or pay attention to someone or something; to pretend not to notice.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To throw out or reject as false or ungrounded — specifically of a grand jury rejecting a bill — and hence more broadly, to refuse to take notice of or shut one's eyes to.
Editorial note: In ordinary modern English, "ignore" is purely behavioral: a choice not to attend to something. In legal usage, the grand jury sense is operational and dispositive — the jury's act of ignoring a bill is a formal legal event that terminates the prosecution, not merely an attitude. Researchers reading historical indictment records must recognize that "ignored" is a term of art equivalent to a finding of no bill, not simply a notation that something was overlooked.
Common Confusion
"Ignore" in the grand jury context is frequently confused with acquittal or dismissal. The grand jury's act of ignoring a bill occurs before any trial and means the charge never proceeds — it is not a finding of innocence on the merits, nor is it a judicial dismissal. Separately, researchers should not conflate "ignore" (the jury's formal rejection) with "ignoramus" (the Latin word historically endorsed on the face of the rejected bill, meaning "we do not know"). The two are connected — the jury ignores the bill, and historically wrote ignoramus on it — but they are not synonymous. See IGNORAMUS.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research hazard is anachronism. In modern legal writing, "ignore" almost never appears in its grand jury sense; a contemporary court or attorney would say the grand jury "returned no bill" or "declined to indict." In historical records — criminal court minutes, indictment papers, and case reports from roughly the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries — "ignored" is the operative word and its appearance signals a specific procedural outcome: the prosecution failed at the grand jury stage.
For corpus researchers, this creates a false-negative problem. A search for "ignored" in historical criminal records will surface procedural grand jury notations that have nothing to do with willful disregard in the modern sense, and vice versa. Filtering by date and document type is essential.
The third sense (grand jury rejection) is also the entry point to a cluster of related terms that must be read together: ignoramus, no bill, true bill, presentment, and indictment. Understanding "ignore" unlocks the vocabulary of the entire historical indictment process.
The first sense — being unacquainted with a fact — appears in older equity pleadings and civil law-influenced treatises. Where a defendant lacked knowledge and wished to put the plaintiff to proof, formal pleadings sometimes employed "ignores" as a statement of non-admission. This usage had largely disappeared from American practice by the mid-nineteenth century but persists in English and mixed-jurisdiction sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
The six source dictionaries agree substantially on structure, listing the same three meanings in essentially the same order. Burrill offers the most contextually useful entry, tracing the term to the Latin ignorare and connecting it explicitly to the ignoramus notation, and quoting the maxim Ignoscitur ei qui sanguinem suum qualiter redemptum voluit (the law excuses one who redeemed his life on whatever terms he could) — a maxim concerning duress, not directly related to the primary legal meanings of "ignore," but appended in Black's and Burrill's likely as a companion reference under the same root.
Bouvier is the most restrained, noting simply that a grand jury ignores a bill when the evidence is insufficient to warrant a presentment — a clean functional definition. Rapalje & Lawrence add the important cross-reference to see INDICTMENT and JURY, confirming that "ignore" was understood as a technical term of indictment procedure, not a standalone concept.
Anderson's is notably abbreviated, defining the term only as "to refuse to find a bill of indictment" and directing the reader to IGNORARI — suggesting that by the time of Anderson's compilation, the grand jury sense had come to dominate to the point where the other meanings needed no separate treatment in a law dictionary.
None of the historical dictionaries address the modern behavioral sense of "ignore" as a term that appears in civil litigation (e.g., ignoring a court order, ignoring discovery obligations). That usage — which carries serious legal consequences — developed through judicial language rather than formal legal vocabulary and will not be found labeled as a term of art in these sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The grand jury sense of "ignore" is an artifact of common law jurisdictions that retained the grand jury as an indictment body. In jurisdictions that have abolished the grand jury for ordinary criminal cases, this technical sense is obsolete in practice, though it will appear throughout historical records. Federal practice in the United States retains the grand jury, but modern federal terminology does not use "ignore" — it uses "no bill."