These words all mean to declare a person to be guilty of some offence or shortcoming. Accuse is the most general word, and may be used in formal or informal, official or personal, contexts. An investigating committee may accuse an officeholder of wrongdoing; a neighbour may accuse a man of playing his radio too loudly.

Charge , in this context, means to accuse formally, usually before a court; by extension, it means to accuse informally of a violation of some accepted standard.

• The police charged the driver with reckless driving; The candidate charged his opponent with evasion of the basic issues.

Incriminate means to charge a person with a crime directly, or to involve him in a crime by damaging testimony. In popular use, the latter is the more usual meaning: He was incriminated by an eyewitness who placed him at the scene of the crime.

Indict and arraign are legal terms. Indict , which is more commonly used in the United States than elsewhere, means to charge officially and to make subject to an appearance before a jury or judge. In an extended sense, indict is to charge unofficially but publicly: to indict a school of writing or painting as being obscurantist. To arraign , legally, is to call an indicted person before a court for trial; by extension, to arraign is to call publicly but unofficially a person or a movement to stand judgement before public opinion or some other standard.

Technically, impeach means to arraign a person ?usually a public official ?before a competent tribunal on a charge of treason or other high crime. In Britain, where the process takes the form of prosecution by the House of Commons before the House of Lords, the last impeachment occurred in 1806, when Lord Melville was acquitted of malversation of public funds while treasurer of the navy.

In extended use, to impeach is to discredit or to call into question: to impeach a witness; to impeach a person’s motives.