accuse: [13] Accuse comes via Old French acuser from the Latin verb accūsāre, which was based on the noun causa ‘cause’ – but cause in the sense not of ‘something that produces a result’, but of ‘legal action’ (a meaning preserved in English cause list, for instance). Hence accūsāre was to ‘call someone to account for their actions’.
The grammatical term accusative [15] (denoting the case of the object of a verb in Latin and other languages) is derived ultimately from accūsāre, but it arose originally owing to a mistranslation. The Greek term for this case was ptósis aitiātiké ‘case denoting causation’ – a reasonable description of the function of the accusative. Unfortunately the Greek verb aitiásthai also meant ‘accuse’, and it was this sense that Latin grammarians chose to render when adopting the term. => cause, excuse
