Definition
An early form, drawn from French maritime usage, of what English and American law came to call average. In maritime law, avarie denotes a loss or damage sustained by a ship or its cargo during a voyage — or, by extension, the contribution levied among interested parties to bear such a loss. The term encompasses two related but distinct concepts: (1) the damage or expense itself, and (2) the apportionment of that damage among shipowners, cargo owners, and other parties with interests in the voyage.
In practice, avarie is the French-law ancestor of the modern doctrines of general average and particular average. General average (avarie grosse or avarie commune) arises when a sacrifice is voluntarily made — jettisoning cargo, for instance — for the common safety of the venture; all parties share the loss proportionally. Particular average (avarie simple or avarie particulière) falls on the individual whose property was damaged, without contribution from others.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in general modern English usage. The word survives in French, Spanish (avería), and other Romance languages to mean damage, breakdown, or defect, especially in goods or machinery.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry avarie as an English entry, reflecting its status as a term of art borrowed directly from French maritime practice rather than naturalized into ordinary English.
Editorial note: Because avarie never crossed fully into lay English, there is no meaningful gap between a common meaning and a legal meaning for English-language researchers. The risk is different: a researcher unfamiliar with French maritime sources may simply not recognize the word at all, or may conflate it with the unrelated English word avaricious. Neither error is trivial in historical documents.
Common Confusion
Avarie and average appear to be unrelated words but are historically connected: average in its maritime sense descends, through Italian avaria and French avarie, from the same root. Researchers encountering average in a modern admiralty context and avarie in a French or civil-law source are looking at cognates, not coincidences. The confusion runs in both directions — modern practitioners may not recognize avarie as a historical predecessor, while historians may underestimate how much the English average doctrine borrowed from the French avarie framework codified in the Ordonnance de la Marine of 1681.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is navigational: avarie appears in French-language sources and in English-language treatises that quote or translate from French maritime law, particularly the Ordonnance de la Marine (Ord. Mar. liv. 3, tit. 7), which Burrill cites directly. Researchers working in early American admiralty law, colonial maritime records, or comparative maritime history will encounter this term in sources that predate the full Anglicization of average doctrine.
Key traps:
— Burrill's entry is sparse, pointing only to the French ordinance without elaboration. Researchers who stop there will miss the substantive doctrine, which is developed under average and general average in English-language sources.
— French maritime law, especially the 1681 Ordonnance, was enormously influential on early American admiralty courts. Encountering avarie in a translated or paraphrased source without recognizing it as average can cause a researcher to miss directly applicable precedent.
— The civil-law tradition distinguishes avarie grosse from avarie simple with more precision than some early English common-law sources. A researcher moving between French and English materials should not assume the categories map perfectly onto one another without checking the specific source's definitions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the only shelf source that carries this entry, and his treatment is characteristically terse: a single line identifying the term as French, placing it in maritime law, and citing the Ordonnance de la Marine. This reflects the reality that avarie was never domesticated into English legal vocabulary — it remained a reference term used when citing French sources, not a working term of the common law.
The Ordonnance de la Marine of 1681, to which Burrill points, is the foundational codification of French maritime law under Louis XIV, drafted under the supervision of Colbert. Title 7 of Book 3 sets out the avarie rules in systematic form and was the primary reference point for both French courts and foreign jurists studying comparative maritime law throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its influence on the York-Antwerp Rules, which eventually standardized general average internationally, is well documented in maritime law scholarship, though that lineage runs through practice and treaty rather than direct transplant.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus carries a substantive entry for avarie. Researchers needing doctrine rather than etymology must move to entries for average, general average, and jettison.
Jurisdictional Note
The term avarie itself has no operative role in modern American, English, or Commonwealth law. Its significance is exclusively historical and comparative. Louisiana, with its civil-law heritage, offers the closest domestic bridge: Louisiana maritime and commercial sources from the colonial and early statehood periods may use avarie or its Spanish cognate avería in ways that require translation to modern average doctrine.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Average
Law Mind Encyclopedia — General Average
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Maritime Law