Definition
To adulterate is to corrupt, debase, or render impure a substance — typically food, drink, medicine, or coin — by mixing it with an inferior, foreign, or harmful material. In legal usage, adulteration describes both the act of such mixing and the condition of the resulting product.
The term appears most often in regulatory and criminal contexts: statutes prohibiting the adulteration of food and drugs, civil liability for selling adulterated goods, and constitutional cases testing the reach of state police power over commercial products.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Corrupted or made impure by being mixed with something else; also, relating to adultery or its offspring.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To corrupt, debase, or make impure by admixture of a foreign or baser substance — as in food, drink, drugs, or coin. Webster's also records an obsolete sense: to defile by adultery.
Editorial note: The overlap between "adulterate" (substance corruption) and "adulterate" (adultery-related) is genuine but archaic in legal writing. Modern legal sources use the term exclusively for contamination of goods. The adultery sense has almost entirely vanished from legal instruments, though historical sources may use both senses in proximity, creating a reading hazard in older texts.
---
Common Confusion
The word's double root — one branch meaning corrupted goods, the other connected to adultery — has caused occasional confusion in historical legal texts where both senses appeared on the same page or even in the same provision. Anderson's Dictionary of Law illustrates this precisely: its entry for "adulterate" slides mid-definition from adulterated milk and liquor statutes directly into language about persons living "together in the same house continually, as man and wife," reflecting a typographical or editorial collision between two separate entries. Researchers working in 19th-century digests and legal dictionaries should treat such transitions as likely editorial artifacts, not unified legal doctrine.
---
Why It Matters in Research
Statutory reach varies by explicit definition. Anderson's flags a critical point: watered milk may not qualify as "adulterated" milk unless a statute expressly says so. This is not a quirk — it reflects a recurring structural problem in historical food and drug law, where courts required the legislature to specify what counts as adulteration rather than letting the common meaning of the word do the work. Researchers reading pre-20th-century cases on food purity must identify what the controlling statute defined as adulteration, not assume the word carried a uniform meaning.
Recovery for adulterated liquor was denied in some states as a matter of public policy. Anderson's notes that "in some States no recovery can be had for a sale of adulterated liquors." This intersects with the broader doctrine of illegality as a bar to contract claims, and researchers should not assume uniform tort or contract exposure for sellers of adulterated alcohol across jurisdictions or time periods.
The term connects the police power corpus directly. Adulteration statutes were among the primary vehicles through which states tested and expanded the police power in the 19th century, and federal law followed with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Cases construing adulteration statutes are foundational to the Law Mind corpus on police power and commerce clause limits.
Historical dictionary cross-contamination. As noted above, Anderson's entry for "adulterate" is typographically merged with material about cohabitation and adultery. Researchers using Anderson's should treat the "adulterate" entry as containing two separate concepts that were apparently run together in the source. The regulatory meaning (contaminated goods) is legally operative; the domestic relations material belongs to a different doctrinal area.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law provides the core regulatory definition — mixing inferior or deleterious matter into food, drink, or drugs intended for sale — and gestures toward two important legal consequences: the denial of recovery in some states for adulterated liquor sales, and the statutory-construction rule that watered milk is not necessarily "adulterated" milk absent explicit legislative declaration. These are practically useful signposts.
What Anderson's does not provide is any treatment of the federal dimension, which is unsurprising given the dictionary's era. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and subsequent federal legislation would reshape the term's legal meaning substantially, attaching detailed statutory definitions that displaced much of the common-law ambiguity Anderson's flags.
Webster's 1913 is useful for confirming that the contamination sense was the dominant common meaning by the late 19th century, with the adultery sense already labeled obsolete. This helps date the functional separation of the two meanings for corpus research purposes.
---
Jurisdictional Note
Adulteration doctrine developed primarily through state police power statutes, and definitions varied considerably by commodity and by state. Federal uniformity came with food and drug legislation in the early 20th century, but state law retained concurrent authority. Researchers working across jurisdictions should identify the operative statute for each state and period, rather than assuming a shared common-law baseline.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Food and Drug Regulation
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Police Power
---