Definition
The degree of care that a reasonably prudent person of ordinary caution and judgment would exercise under the same or similar circumstances. Ordinary care is not a fixed or absolute standard — it is inherently contextual, calibrated to the nature of the activity, the foreseeable risks involved, and the relationship between the parties. A person exercises ordinary care when they act as a reasonable member of the community would act when faced with comparable conditions and comparable stakes.
Ordinary care is the foundational standard of conduct in negligence law. A failure to exercise ordinary care — doing less than what the reasonably prudent person would do, or doing something that reasonably prudent person would not — constitutes the breach element of a negligence claim.
The term is consistently treated by courts and commentators as equivalent in meaning to reasonable care and due care, though jurisdictions differ slightly in preferred phrasing.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Ordinary" means usual, customary, or of a standard kind. "Care" means attentiveness, caution, or the effort taken to avoid harm or error.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Ordinary" — of common or everyday occurrence; of a usual kind. "Care" — caution; watchful attention to avoid harm or error; solicitude.
The ordinary English meaning of this phrase — roughly, routine attentiveness — comes close to the legal meaning but misses a critical dimension. In law, "ordinary care" is not simply the care one happens to exercise in daily life; it is a normative standard, asking what a person of ordinary prudence ought to have done, not merely what is statistically common. Ordinary negligence can be found even when the defendant's conduct was typical for their community, if that community norm falls below what reasonable prudence demands.
Common Confusion
ORDINARY CARE vs. SLIGHT CARE vs. GREAT CARE: Older common law and some bailment authorities organized care into a three-tier hierarchy — slight care (owed by gratuitous bailees benefiting only the bailor), ordinary care (owed when both parties benefit), and great care (owed by bailees receiving sole benefit). This tripartite structure appears in Bouvier and in story on bailments. Modern tort law has largely collapsed this framework in favor of a single reasonable-person standard, but the older categories survive in some bailment contexts and in historical sources. Researchers encountering "slight care" or "great care" in older materials should not read them as synonyms for ordinary care.
ORDINARY CARE vs. GROSS NEGLIGENCE: Ordinary care and gross negligence operate on opposite ends of a spectrum. Failure to exercise ordinary care produces ordinary negligence. Gross negligence involves a substantially more serious departure from the standard — a conscious or reckless indifference to risk. The distinction matters for damages (punitive damages often require gross negligence), for statutory immunity provisions, and for contractual liability waivers.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter ordinary care across multiple doctrinal contexts — tort, contract, bailment, and professional liability — and the term carries slightly different weight in each. In tort law, it is simply the negligence standard. In bailment law, it carries the specialized meaning from the tripartite care framework, which requires knowing whether the older or modern approach governs. In contract law, care standards may be modified by agreement, making the default "ordinary care" standard a starting point that parties can contractually displace.
Historical sources, including all three dictionaries represented here, reflect the bailment-era understanding in which "ordinary care" was the middle tier of a graduated scale. Researchers using Bouvier or Burrill in particular should be alert to this: when those sources define ordinary care by reference to "bailees for the mutual benefit of bailor and bailee," they are describing a specific doctrinal context, not the general negligence standard. The Black's definition is closer to the modern usage — treating ordinary care as equivalent to reasonable care without confining it to bailment.
The reasonable person formulation now dominates in American and Commonwealth jurisdictions, meaning that "ordinary care," "reasonable care," and "due care" should generally be treated as interchangeable in modern materials. When editing or comparing older cases, watch for jurisdictions that retained the three-tier framework longer than others; some state courts applied it outside the bailment context well into the twentieth century.
One navigational trap: the word "ordinary" can appear in other legal phrases — "ordinary course of business," "ordinary income," "ordinary meaning" — with no connection to the care standard. In database searches, ordinary care must be searched as a phrase to avoid noise from these unrelated usages.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionaries converge on the core proposition: ordinary care is measured by reference to persons of ordinary prudence under the same or similar circumstances. Burrill's phrasing — "the care which may reasonably be expected from a person in the party's situation" — most clearly anticipates the modern reasonable-person formulation. Black's explicitly states the equivalence to reasonable care and notes the objective community standard. Bouvier grounds the definition in the mutual-benefit bailment context, citing Story on Bailments, which limits the generality of its formulation.
None of the three dictionaries fully addresses the professional care context, where the relevant comparator is not the ordinary person but the ordinary member of the relevant profession. This gap is significant: the reasonable professional standard is technically a variant of ordinary care but requires its own research pathway through professional liability materials, not through the general negligence literature.
The Ohio case cited in Black's (8 Ohio St. 581) reflects mid-nineteenth-century language typical of state court definitions from that period, when courts were still formalizing negligence doctrine and often expressed the standard in terms of successful commercial enterprise rather than personal conduct. That framing has not survived into modern usage.
Jurisdictional Note
In most American jurisdictions, ordinary care, reasonable care, and due care are used interchangeably, and jury instructions typically use one phrase or another without doctrinal distinction. A minority of jurisdictions retain graduated care standards in specific statutory or common law contexts — particularly in bailment, common carrier liability, and guest statutes — where ordinary care retains its older technical meaning as a mid-tier standard. Researchers should check jurisdiction-specific jury instruction guides before treating the terms as fully synonymous in any particular state.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia: Negligence — Standard of Care for Children (torts_5). The children's standard of care entry addresses how the ordinary care baseline is modified when the defendant or plaintiff is a minor — directly relevant to understanding the flexibility of the "ordinary" standard.