Indictment

How to spell indictment

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce indictment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does indictment mean?

1. nounA formal written accusation that a person has committed a serious crime.
2. nounA clear sign or statement that something is seriously wrong or deserves strong condemnation.

Indictment in a sentence

• The grand jury handed down an indictment against the former executive.

• The collapsed bridge was a damning indictment of years of neglected maintenance.

• Prosecutors spent months building the indictment before any arrest was made.

• The report stands as a sweeping indictment of the company's safety culture.

Where does indictment come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The root sits in the Latin verb dictare, meaning 'to say repeatedly, to declare or dictate', itself a frequentative of dicere 'to speak'. Combined with the prefix in- in the sense of 'against', this gave a notion of formally declaring a charge against someone. English took the word in the 1300s from Anglo-French enditer, 'to accuse or write down', and at first it was spelled and pronounced much as it sounded, with forms like 'enditement' or 'inditement'. During the Renaissance, scholars who admired classical Latin restyled the spelling to put the 'c' back in, lining it up with dictare even though nobody pronounced that consonant. That learned respelling is exactly the spelling trap: the 'c' is purely historical and silent, so the word reads as 'in-DITE-ment'. The same dicere family gives us 'dictate', 'verdict', and 'dictionary', all visibly sounding their 'c' where indictment hides it.

How the word is built

• in- (against)
• dict (from Latin dictare: to say, declare)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)