advice
Pluraladvices (some meanings)
Often confused with advise
- 1An opinion or recommendation offered to guide what someone should do.
She offered some practical advice on handling difficult coworkers.
Against everyone's advice, he quit his job to start a bakery.
UsageSay a piece of advice or some advice (not
incorrect: an advice), advice on or about something. The verb is advise. - 2A formal communication explaining how the law applies to a particular matter, such as an action someone is considering.
Counsel prepared a detailed advice on the firm's exposure under the new regulations.
The board requested an advice clarifying how the merger rules applied to the deal.
UsageIn this legal use, counsel prepares an advice and several are advices; everyday advice takes no an.
Similaropinion
Note
As a rule it informs rather than binds. Robert M. MacLean's European Community Law Textbook (1992) places an advice outside the formal binding acts, and in the Pennsylvania Bulletin chief counsel prepares an advice while the Commission gives an opinion, its nearest neighbor and the term most easily confused with it.
- 3A formal notice of a commercial or financial transaction, such as a payment made or a bill of exchange drawn.
The bank issued an advice confirming that the funds had been credited to our account.
Each advice was numbered and matched against the corresponding invoice.
UsageOften in payment advice or remittance advice; one notice is an advice.
Note
Banking turns the word into a countable document. A Reserve Bank issues an advice confirming a transaction, and an advice of an incoming settlement payment order goes to a receiving bank. In the older phrase letter of advice the word stays uncountable and names the information sent; here the noun names the document itself.
Less common meanings
- 4Information or news that is given; reports received from elsewhere.
Note
News rather than counsel, and countable where the everyday sense is not: late advices from France were reports just arrived. The plural is the usual form, which makes this sense easy to spot in older writing.
Checked 5 Nov 2026 · 2 facts
- In this older sense, advice means news or reports and can be countable, unlike ordinary advice meaning counsel; the example refers to recent reports from France. en.wiktionary.org
- The news sense commonly occurs in the plural and is characteristic of older writing. en.wiktionary.org
- 5Careful, deliberate consideration; awareness or knowledge of a matter.
How shall I dote on her with more advice, That thus without advice begin to love her?
c. 1590, William Shakespeare, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”Note
An older, inward meaning: advice as the thinking a person does before acting, not the counsel someone else offers. Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona uses it twice in one sentence: a lover who begins "without advice" has fallen in love without reflection. In this obsolete sense, read "without advice" as "rashly," not "uncounseled."
- 6In programming, especially aspect-oriented programming, a piece of code set to run automatically before, after, or around other code at chosen join points.
Practice
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Origin
The Old French phrase "ce m'est a vis" ("in my view") gave the noun "avis," in which "vis" goes back to Latin "visus," past participle of "videre" ("to see"). Middle English took it as "avys"; English added the unhistoric -d- in the 15th century, and the word mostly replaced the native Old English "rǣd."