Nota Bene (N.B.)
Latin for 'note well' — flags a qualification the reader must not skip.
N.B. abbreviates nota bene, an imperative meaning 'note well'. It marks a caveat, exception, or condition attached to material just presented, and it belongs to the same family of scholarly Latin abbreviations as cf., viz., and q.v.
Its correct home is in notes, glosses, and annotations rather than in running prose. Modern style guides — Chicago and the AMA among them — recommend writing 'note' or 'important' in body text and reserving N.B. for footnotes, tables, and legal or medical annotation, where space is tight and readers are trained in the convention.
In quotation practice, N.B. is useful when a source needs a warning that the citation itself cannot carry: a translation is the editor's own, a manuscript reading is disputed, a figure is estimated. The abbreviation signals that what follows constrains how the quotation may be used.
Common mistake: using N.B. as decoration for emphasis. If the following sentence is not a qualification or exception, plain emphasis or an ordinary sentence does the job better.
“N.B. All translations from the Greek are the author's own unless otherwise indicated.”
Keep reading the glossary
A Latin citation abbreviation for confer, 'compare' — used to point the reader to a related passage.
Abbreviation of 'quod vide' — 'which see' — directing the reader to another entry.
Latin for 'thus' — used in quotes to mark an error reproduced from the original.
An unnumbered note that credits the origin of a whole chapter, table, epigraph, or image.