Definition
To deprive a person of a member or part of the body in a manner that permanently diminishes their capacity for self-defense or combat. Maim is the verb form of the common law crime of mayhem: the act of inflicting such an injury constitutes the offense. At common law, the defining element was not merely physical injury but functional military incapacity — the loss had to render the victim less able to fight or defend himself. The injury must also be permanent; a wound that heals without lasting impairment does not rise to the level of maiming.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To wound seriously; to cause permanent loss of function of a limb or part of the body.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To deprive of the use of a limb so as to render a person less able to defend himself or annoy his adversary; also used more broadly to mean mutilate, cripple, or impair.
The common usage has drifted toward general serious bodily injury, losing the specific fighting-capacity test that defined the term at law. A researcher reading a modern source that says a victim was "maimed" cannot assume the legal standard of mayhem has been met. Conversely, an injury that legally constitutes maim under the common law standard may not match lay intuitions about severity, since the doctrine focused on military utility rather than pain or disfigurement as such.
Common Confusion
Maim and wound are frequently treated as synonyms in non-legal writing but are technically distinct at common law. A wound breaks the continuity of the outer skin and may heal completely; maim implies permanent injury that diminishes fighting capacity. A stab wound that fully heals is a wound, not a maim. Separately, maim and mayhem are related but not identical: maim is the act (the verb), mayhem is the crime (the noun). All maiming constitutes mayhem, but the word mayhem has acquired colloquial meanings — chaos, disorder — that have no legal content.
Why It Matters in Research
Corpus researchers should be alert to two compounding issues. First, the fighting-capacity test is genuinely archaic. Modern statutes defining aggravated battery, serious bodily injury, or disfigurement have replaced it, and many jurisdictions no longer use the word "maim" in their criminal codes at all. When a 19th-century indictment or case report charges "assault with intent to maim," the researcher must apply the common law test, not a modern serious-injury standard — the distinction can determine whether a particular blow to the head, for instance, satisfies the charge. Bouvier notes explicitly that a blow aimed at the head did not constitute assault with intent to maim under New York's revised statutes, a result that would surprise researchers assuming equivalence with serious bodily injury.
Second, historical pleading practice required specificity: both common law and the more liberal practice of the period demanded that an indictment for maiming or mayhem identify which member or part of the body was injured. Anderson's confirms this. Researchers examining historical indictments who find vague injury descriptions should treat them as potentially defective under period standards, which may explain case outcomes that otherwise seem puzzling.
Third, the permanent-injury requirement is the sharpest research trap. Sources that describe an injury as severe or grievous are not necessarily describing an injury that constitutes maim. The test is permanence plus functional incapacity, not severity of pain or extent of bleeding. Black's draws the wound/maim distinction explicitly on this axis.
Historical Dictionary Support
The sources converge on the fighting-capacity definition but vary in emphasis. Black's (both editions) anchors the definition in the Latin maxim — maihemium est membri mutilatio — and frames the injury test in military terms: the victim must be rendered less useful in fighting. Bouvier echoes this but contextualizes it in the criminal law setting and flags the New York pleading result as a practical limitation. Burrill treats "maim" as an older form of "maihem," directing readers to the mayhem entries and confirming that the two terms are historically interchangeable in spelling and substance.
Anderson's entry is anomalous: the surrounding text in the source concerns mail (postal matters), suggesting a typesetting or alphabetization issue in the original, though the substantive content on maiming and mayhem is legally coherent and consistent with the other sources. Rapalje & Lawrence provides only a page reference without substantive definition, offering no independent analytical value here.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the transition away from the common law test in American statutory law during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. None of the sources addresses the replacement of maim/mayhem with broader statutory formulations, leaving a gap that researchers must fill with legislative history rather than dictionary authority.
Jurisdictional Note
The common law definition anchored in fighting capacity has been largely superseded by statute. Many American jurisdictions fold what was once maiming into aggravated battery, mayhem, or serious bodily injury provisions without using the word "maim." English law similarly modernized the offense through the Offences Against the Person Act. Researchers working across jurisdictions should identify the governing statute and period before applying any dictionary definition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Mayhem; Assault and Battery; Common Law Crimes.