Definition
Latin. Marks, signs, or characters used as abbreviations in written documents. In Roman law, sigla referred specifically to the shorthand symbols and contracted notations used by scribes and legal drafters in official texts, edicts, and codifications. The term is the plural of siglum (itself a contraction of sigilla).
Sigla were common in the manuscripts of the Corpus Juris Civilis and other Roman legal texts, where space, convention, and scribal practice led to the heavy use of abbreviated notation. Justinian's legislation explicitly addressed sigla, restricting their use in legal writing on the grounds that abbreviations obscured the meaning of laws — a recognition that sigla posed genuine interpretive hazards in legal instruments.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of siglum; signs, abbreviations, or symbols used in manuscripts, coins, medals, or scholarly apparatus.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The signs, abbreviations, letters, or characters standing for words, shorthand, etc., in ancient manuscripts, or on coins, medals, etc."
The common and legal meanings are unusually close here, but the legal meaning carries a specific institutional weight that the general usage omits. In ordinary scholarly or numismatic contexts, sigla are simply notational shorthand. In Roman law, sigla were a subject of active legislative concern: Justinian's Codex prohibited their use in the drafting of legal texts precisely because they bred interpretive ambiguity and dispute. The legal meaning is therefore not just descriptive but regulatory.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering sigla in Law Mind's historical corpus will meet the term in two distinct contexts that require different handling.
First, as a substantive legal concept: Justinian's prohibition on sigla in legal drafting (Cod. Just. 1, 17, 2) is a real doctrinal moment worth understanding on its own terms. It reflects Roman jurisprudence's concern with textual clarity and the dangers of ambiguity in positive law — a concern with direct parallels in later common law treatment of latent ambiguity in written instruments.
Second, as a practical manuscript problem: Researchers working with Latin legal manuscripts, civil law digests, or early printed editions of the Corpus Juris Civilis will encounter sigla as a paleographic and editorial challenge. Abbreviations in these texts are often resolved differently across editions, and mistranscription or misexpansion of sigla has historically generated variant readings with real doctrinal consequences. When Law Mind sources cite to the Codex or Digest, they are often citing through editions that have already resolved — sometimes incorrectly — the sigla in the underlying manuscript tradition.
Neither Black's edition addresses this practical dimension. Researchers who encounter sigla only through these dictionary entries may not recognize that the term operates simultaneously as a legal concept and as a textual hazard embedded in the very sources they are consulting.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on the core definition: sigla are marks or signs of abbreviation used in writing under Roman law, with reference to Cod. 1, 17. The two Black's editions are identical on this point, offering a minimal but accurate entry.
Burrill adds useful contextual texture, connecting sigla to the broader Roman law vocabulary of signing and sealing, and noting the derivation from signare (to seal) as distinguished from subscribere (to subscribe). This distinction matters: Roman legal formality around documents was structured around specific physical acts — sealing, signing, subscribing — and sigla occupied a separate, notational register from any of these.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is less directly useful on sigla itself, spending its space on the related concepts of sign and signature, but it reinforces the connection to Roman documentary practice.
What none of the historical dictionaries address is the Justinianic legislation restricting sigla — the very legal episode that gave the term its doctrinal significance. The Codex provision (Cod. Just. 1, 17, 2, § 22) prohibiting the use of sigla in composing laws ("leges per siglorum obscuritates conscribere") is the most legally meaningful fact about the term, and it appears only in the Latin dictionary source, not in any of the law dictionaries. This is a genuine gap in the historical dictionary tradition for this term.
Jurisdictional Note
Sigla as an operative legal concept belongs to Roman and civil law systems. In common law jurisdictions, the term has no direct doctrinal function, though it appears in scholarly and paleographic discussion of civil law sources. Researchers working in mixed jurisdictions (Louisiana, Quebec, Scotland, South Africa) with deep civil law roots may encounter sigla in historical commentary on foundational texts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Roman Law
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Manuscript and Documentary Evidence