How do you spell the word for a formal decision?

The correct spelling of the word for a formal court decision is Verdict: v-e-r-d-i-c-t, seven letters, with the consonant cluster -ct at the end. The word comes from the Anglo-French verdit, from the Latin vere dictum (truly said), where vere means truly and dictum means said. The most common spelling errors are doubling the d (Verdiict), missing the c (Verdit), or substituting the ending (Verdick or Verdickt).

One memory aid: VER-DICT, where dict is the same root that gives English dictate, dictionary, and predict (all related to saying or speaking). On the USCIS writing test sentences containing verdict are less common than basic vocabulary but may include "The jury reached a verdict" or "The verdict was guilty."

In U.S. criminal law a verdict is the decision rendered by a jury (or by a judge in a bench trial) on the question of guilt: guilty or not guilty. The Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants in criminal cases the right to a trial by an impartial jury, and the Supreme Court held in Ramos v. Louisiana (2020) that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous verdicts in state felony cases. If the jury cannot agree the result is a hung jury and the judge declares a mistrial; the prosecution may then retry the defendant without violating the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

In civil trials the verdict resolves liability, and the standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence rather than the criminal beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard. In federal criminal trials a jury consists of 12 jurors and the verdict must be unanimous to convict; civil juries are usually smaller depending on local court rules.