Definition
A Latin word of reference meaning "see." Used in legal texts, treatises, and judicial opinions to direct the reader's attention to another passage, section, or authority. It functions as a citation shorthand rather than as a term of substantive law.
Standard compound forms carry specific directional meaning:
- Vide ante / Vide supra: "See above" — refers the reader to a passage earlier in the same document.
- Vide post / Vide infra: "See below" — refers the reader to a passage appearing later in the same document.
- Vide also appears in compound cross-reference constructions such as vide etiam ("see also") and q.v. (quod vide, "which see"), the latter directing the reader to a separate entry or authority entirely.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To divide; or, in legislative procedure, to order members of an assembly to physically separate into groups for a vote count.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The imperative singular of the Latin videre, meaning "to see" — used to direct attention to something, as in "vide supra, see above."
The legal use of vide follows the Webster's sense precisely and has nothing to do with the Wiktionary senses of division or legislative procedure. A researcher encountering vide in a legal text should disregard the division meaning entirely; the two words are homographs from different Latin roots and different legal traditions.
Common Confusion
Vide is sometimes confused with the abbreviation q.v. (quod vide). Both are cross-reference signals, but they function differently. Vide is typically a bare directive — "see this" — while q.v. specifically marks a word or phrase as itself having a separate entry worth consulting, functioning more like "see the entry for." In older legal dictionaries and encyclopedias, q.v. appears after a term name; vide appears before the passage or section being referenced.
Why It Matters in Research
Vide is a navigational term, not a substantive one, but researchers working in pre-twentieth-century legal texts will encounter it constantly. Failure to recognize its directional variants — particularly the ante/post and supra/infra pairs — can cause a reader to look in the wrong direction when following a cross-reference, which in dense treatise writing may mean missing the authority entirely.
In the Law Mind corpus, vide appears most heavily in older treatises and digests where inline citation conventions had not yet standardized. Writers used vide in place of what modern legal writing would handle with a parenthetical citation or a footnote. When a historical source says "vide the next chapter" or "vide post," the referenced material may be pages away and is not always structurally obvious.
One practical trap: the terms supra and infra also appear independently in legal writing as standalone cross-reference words, not always preceded by vide. The meaning is the same, but the form varies by author and era. A researcher combing older case law or treatise text should recognize all four constructions — vide supra, vide infra, supra alone, infra alone — as equivalent navigational signals.
Vide also appears in certain Latin maxims quoted in legal sources. The entry in Black's includes the maxim Videbis ea sæpe committi quæ sæpe vindicantur ("You will see these things frequently committed which are frequently punished"), drawn from Coke's Institutes. This is a standalone aphorism, not a cross-reference use of vide, and should not be confused with the directional function described above.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) defines vide identically as "a word of reference," then explains the directional pairs ante/supra and post/infra. The definitions are functionally complete for a term of this kind. Neither edition addresses vide etiam or q.v. as companion constructions, which is a minor gap for researchers needing to distinguish the full family of Latin cross-reference signals in historical texts. Both editions append the Coke maxim as illustrative of vide's Latin root without distinguishing it from the directional use — a slight organizational looseness, but not misleading. No meaningful divergence exists between the two editions on this term.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See also Law Mind Encyclopedia: Latin Terms in Legal Writing; Citation Conventions in Historical Legal Texts.