Definition
Biddings are the offers of a price made by prospective buyers for goods or other property put up for sale at auction. The term is the plural form of "bidding" and refers collectively to the competitive price proposals submitted during an auction proceeding. Each bidding represents a binding or potentially binding offer to purchase at the stated price, subject to the rules governing the particular auction. The term appears most often in older legal writing concerned with auction sales, judicial sales, and the law of contracts formed through the auction process.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "bidding." In ordinary speech, "biddings" is rarely used; the more common forms are "bids" (for auction offers) or "bidding" as an uncountable noun describing the process of making offers at auction.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately defined; treated as the plural of "bidding," meaning an offer of a price at an auction, or a command or invitation.
The gap between common and legal usage is modest but worth noting. In ordinary language, "bids" has almost entirely replaced "biddings" as the plural noun for auction offers. In legal sources — particularly older treatises and court documents — "biddings" carries a specific technical weight, referring to the offers collectively as legal acts that may be opened, withdrawn, or set aside by a court. The phrase "opening biddings," for example, is a term of art in equity proceedings with no real counterpart in everyday speech.
Common Confusion
Biddings should not be confused with the act of bidding as a process. "Biddings" refers to the discrete offers themselves — the legal acts of tendering a price — while "the bidding" or "the auction" refers to the proceeding as a whole. In historical sources, "opening biddings" is a distinct equitable remedy (an application to reopen a completed auction sale to allow further competition) and should not be read as merely resuming an ongoing auction.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter "biddings" almost exclusively in older legal materials. The term is effectively archaic in modern practice, where "bids" is universal in statutes, regulations, and court rules governing public procurement, judicial sales, and foreclosure auctions. When searching historical case law or treatises, "biddings" may appear where a modern search for "bids" would not retrieve the relevant passage — worth bearing in mind when researching nineteenth-century auction law or equity proceedings.
The phrase "opening biddings" is the most research-sensitive context. It refers to an equitable application, typically made to a court of chancery or its successor, to set aside a completed auction sale and reopen the property to further competitive offers — usually on grounds that the price realized was grossly inadequate or that the sale was attended by irregularity or collusion. Burrill's cross-reference to "Opening biddings" signals that this was a recognized equitable doctrine with its own body of case law. Researchers pursuing that doctrine should search under both "opening biddings" and "setting aside sale" in historical digests.
The Rapalje & Lawrence citation to 68 N.Y. 479 in connection with "biennially appoint" appears to be an unrelated entry collapsed in the source text and should not be treated as authority on the law of biddings.
Kent's Commentaries (4 Kent's Com. 191–192), cited by Burrill, remains the most instructive period treatise for understanding the legal framework of auction sales and the status of biddings as offers under early American contract law.
Jurisdictional variation in public bidding law — governing government procurement and construction contracts — is substantial in modern practice, but that body of law typically uses "bids" rather than "biddings" and operates under detailed statutory regimes rather than the common-law auction framework in which this term originated.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition: biddings are offers of a price for goods or property put up for sale at auction. Black's and Burrill track nearly identical language. Rapalje & Lawrence adds nothing substantive beyond directing the reader to the entry for BID.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the legal effect of biddings — whether they constitute irrevocable offers, how they are withdrawn, and under what circumstances a court will set them aside. Those questions were the subject of equity jurisprudence developed largely through case law rather than codified doctrine, and the dictionary entries only hint at that complexity through Burrill's cross-reference to "Opening biddings." Researchers should not rely on the dictionary definitions alone for questions about the enforceability or revocability of auction offers; treatise authority and period case law are necessary.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Insurance Law Encyclopedia: Surety Bonds — Performance, Payment, and Bid Bonds (Cross-Reference to Construction). Relevant for researchers connecting the law of auction biddings to modern bid bond practice, where a bidder's bond secures the obligation to enter into a contract if the bid is accepted — a direct descendant of the legal consequences attaching to biddings at common law.