Definition
A Latin term from Roman civil law meaning, in its primary sense, to receive or to take — particularly to receive property under a will or other disposition. Accipere carries several distinct meanings in legal usage depending on context:
1. To receive or take, especially in the context of testamentary succession — the act of taking what has been given or bequeathed.
2. To admit or acknowledge — as in acknowledging a fact, obligation, or legal relationship.
3. To receive or sustain, as in suffering or bearing an injury or loss.
4. To take, understand, or construe — applied to the interpretation of legal language, meaning to take words in a particular sense.
Common Confusion
Accipere is closely related to, but distinct from, capere — the simpler Latin verb meaning to take or seize. Where capere suggests the act of taking by one's own initiative or force, accipere implies reception, the taking of something offered, given, or transmitted. In testamentary and succession contexts, the distinction matters: a legatee who accipere receives what has been designated for them, whereas capere implies a more active or unilateral acquisition. Researchers encountering either term in translated or digested Roman law sources should confirm which Latin root underlies the text, as translators do not always preserve the distinction.
Why It Matters in Research
Accipere appears primarily in sources engaged with Roman civil law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, and the common law's reception of civilian concepts through early English and continental jurisprudence. Researchers working in Law Mind's historical legal dictionary corpus will encounter the term principally in Burrill and similar nineteenth-century dictionaries that preserved Latinate civil law vocabulary for practitioners trained in both common law and equity.
The interpretive meaning — to construe or understand — is particularly significant for researchers reading older legal commentary. When a civil law jurist writes that a word is to be "accipiendum" in a certain sense, the reference is to this constructive meaning of accipere: a direction about how legal language should be received or understood. Missing this usage can cause a reader to mistake a rule of construction for a statement of substantive law.
The injury-bearing sense of the term (to receive or sustain a loss) appears in contexts involving damnum and related civil law concepts, where the passive reception of harm is analytically relevant to questions of standing and recovery.
Because accipere is a term of Roman law absorbed into legal Latin generally, it migrated into ecclesiastical law, Scots law, and early chancery practice. Its meaning in any given source must be read against the tradition that source is drawing on.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this entry and provides the essential framework. Burrill derives the term from ad + capere and cross-references Brissonius — Nicolas Brisson's Lexicon Juris of the sixteenth century — and the Digest of Justinian (Dig. 50.16.71), which is the locus classicus for civil law definitions of terms used in legal instruments and testaments. Burrill correctly identifies the four distinct senses without ranking them, leaving context to do that work.
The Digest citation is reliable and traceable. Digest 50.16 is the title De Verborum Significatione — on the meaning of words — a title that itself concerns legal construction, making it entirely fitting that accipere in its interpretive sense should be anchored there.
What Burrill does not do, and what no single historical dictionary entry can do, is fully convey how accipere functions rhetorically in civil law argument. The term often appears in the passive (accipiendum est, accipi debet) as a formula signaling that the jurist is settling the interpretive question of how a word or provision should be read. This rhetorical function is invisible if the researcher reads accipere only as a neutral verb of reception.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Civil Law; Testamentary Succession; Interpretation of Legal Instruments