Definition
A cater cousin is a distant or remote relative — historically, a cousin in the fourth degree, and by extension, any relation too remote to be practically significant. The term appears in legal writing primarily to describe the outer edges of kinship, where the connection is real but attenuated. It carries no technical operative meaning in modern law and functions instead as a descriptor when writers wish to acknowledge a familial link while signaling its remoteness.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not in active standard use. Occasionally found in archaic or literary contexts meaning a distant relation or a slight acquaintance.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): An intimate friend; a close acquaintance. Also, by some accounts, a distant cousin.
Editorial note: The common and legal meanings run in nearly opposite directions. In older general English, "cater cousin" sometimes meant a close companion or bosom friend — the intimacy sense. In legal usage, the term consistently denoted remoteness of kinship. A researcher encountering the phrase outside legal texts should not assume the legal meaning applies.
Common Confusion
The confusion here is internal to historical sources rather than between competing modern terms. "Cater" in this phrase is widely understood as a corruption of "quater" (Latin/French for four), pointing to the fourth degree of kinship. Bouvier and Burrill both trace the term to Blackstone's Law Tracts, where Blackstone makes the quater cousin derivation explicit. However, in general literary usage the word occasionally drifted toward meaning closeness rather than distance — likely because "cater" was separately associated with provisioning or caring. The legal tradition held consistently to the remoteness meaning. Do not read the term as implying intimacy when found in legal or quasi-legal sources.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially historical. It will appear in older treatises, wills, intestacy discussions, and kinship tables where writers needed shorthand for a relation too remote to inherit under close-kin rules. Researchers working in equity, inheritance, or family law materials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may encounter it as passing description rather than operative legal category.
The key navigational point: cater cousin signals that a kinship claim is being acknowledged but discounted. When you see it in a primary source, the author is typically explaining why the relationship at issue does not qualify for a closer-kin benefit — not asserting a substantive right based on that relationship.
The term does not appear in modern statutory codes or restatements. It will not appear in twentieth-century legal materials except in historical discussion. If encountered in a contemporary document, treat it as an affectation or quotation from an older source.
Corpus connections: Researchers tracing intestate succession doctrine or the historical development of consanguinity tables will find this term alongside degree-of-relationship calculations. It sits at the edge of what older writers called "collateral" kindred — relations outside the direct line who may or may not fall within a statute's operative degrees.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four sources consulted are in broad agreement and add up to a coherent picture when read together. Black's (1st ed.) offers the shortest gloss: a very distant relation. Bouvier repeats this and cites Blackstone's Law Tracts — the anchor for the term in Anglo-American legal writing. Burrill goes further, flagging that the word is a corruption of "quater cousin" and attributing that derivation explicitly to Blackstone. Black's (2nd ed.) formalizes the synthesis: "from Fr. quatre-cousin; a cousin in the fourth degree; hence any distant or remote relative."
What historical sources largely skip is the general-English ambiguity noted above. None of the legal dictionaries acknowledge that ordinary usage sometimes ran the other direction. For corpus purposes, Blackstone's Law Tracts remains the primary authority; the legal dictionaries are all downstream of that single citation.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Consanguinity and Degrees of Relationship; Intestate Succession — Historical Development.