fraus

The Latin noun fraus carried a double meaning that modern English has collapsed into one. It meant both 'deceit' and 'injury' — the trick and the damage the trick caused. Roman law treated them as inseparable. You could not have fraus without a victim, and the victim's loss was part of the word's definition.

Roman jurists writing in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE — Gaius, Ulpian, Paulus — built an elaborate taxonomy of bad faith. Dolus was intentional malice. Culpa was negligence. Fraus sat between them: deliberate deception that caused harm, but without the raw hatred of dolus. A man who sold you a horse he knew was lame committed fraus. A man who burned your stable committed dolus.

Old French inherited the word as fraude by the 13th century, and English took it from there around 1340. The legal meaning stayed remarkably stable across the transfer — fraud in English still means deception causing injury, just as fraus did in Justinian's Digest. Few words have held their legal definition across seventeen centuries and three languages.

By the 18th century, fraud had expanded beyond courtrooms into everyday speech. A person could be 'a fraud' — the word becoming an identity, not just an act. Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary listed both senses: the crime and the person. The Roman jurists who separated dolus from fraus would recognize the word instantly, though they might be puzzled that English uses one term where they used a dozen.