nota bene
Note well — pointing the reader at something they must not skip.
“N.B. the office is closed on Friday.”
“Nota bene: applications received after noon will not be considered, whatever the postmark says.”
“The terms ran to nine pages and the only thing that mattered sat behind a nota bene on page seven, which is a defensible way to publish a condition and a poor way to communicate one.”
Nota bene is an instruction, not a description: note well, mark this. Notare is the Latin verb behind English note, notice and notorious, and bene supplies the bene- of benefit and benevolent.
The phrase belongs to the margins of manuscripts. Scribes and readers used a small set of Latin tags to flag passages — nota bene for something important, sic for something surviving an error, vide for a cross-reference — and printers carried them into books. The abbreviation N.B. is one of the last of that system still in ordinary use.
English uses it in writing rather than speech, and it has a faintly severe tone: an N.B. is what you attach to the condition, the deadline, or the exception that the reader is otherwise going to miss and later claim they were never told about.
What Rome left in English — Caesar, the arena, the roads, the law, and the poets.
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a Pyrrhic victory (idiom)
A win that costs so much it feels almost like a defeat.
- 02
a Roman holiday (idiom)
Enjoyment taken from watching somebody else suffer.
- 03
ad hoc (idiom)
Made for this one situation, with no general rule behind it.
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ad nauseam (idiom)
Repeated so often that everyone is sick of it.
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all roads lead to Rome (idiom)
Different paths can take one to the same goal.
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alter ego (idiom)
A second self — either a trusted other person or a different side of yourself.
Last updated August 3, 2026