Definition
An archaic Law French term, now obsolete in practice, meaning "he" or "that one." Cili is a corrupted form of celui, the Law French pronoun used in legal instruments, pleadings, and records to refer to a specific named or previously identified male person — equivalent to the modern English "he" or "that person." It appears in early English legal manuscripts and glossaries as a remnant of the Anglo-Norman legal vocabulary that dominated English law from the Norman Conquest through the late medieval period.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A county of Zhangjiajie, Hunan, China. No connection to the legal term.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not recorded; the term did not enter general English usage.
The legal term cili has no relationship to its modern geographical homonym. The word survived only in legal manuscripts and law dictionaries as a curiosity of Law French orthography, never entering ordinary English speech in its legal sense.
Common Confusion
Cili is easily confused with celui, its uncorrupted parent form, which appears far more frequently in Law French sources. Researchers encountering cili in a manuscript should treat it as a phonetic or scribal variant of celui rather than a distinct term. The distinction is orthographic, not semantic. Burrill cross-references Kelham's glossary for both forms, indicating that even nineteenth-century lexicographers regarded cili primarily as a corruption warranting a redirect rather than independent treatment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English legal records, Year Books, or early plea rolls will encounter Law French with significant spelling instability. Scribal corruptions of common pronouns like celui were not unusual, and cili represents exactly this class of variant. If searching a digitized corpus for this term, be prepared for false negatives: the same word may appear as celi, cely, celui, or cellui in different hands or periods. Conversely, a keyword search for cili in a Law French document corpus will yield sparse results precisely because the uncorrupted form celui dominated formal usage.
The practical consequence for researchers is that cili functions as a trail marker rather than a substantive legal concept. Its presence in a document tells you the instrument is written in Law French and that the scribe was working in a vernacular or informal register where pronunciation-based spelling crept in. It does not carry doctrinal weight on its own; its significance is entirely contextual — who is the "he" being referenced, and what legal act is being attributed to that person?
Because cili appears in Burrill cross-referenced to Kelham, researchers using Burrill's Law Dictionary should note that Kelham's Law French glossary (A Dictionary of the Norman or Old French Language, 1779) is the primary scholarly source for this class of variant. Burrill's treatment is derivative of Kelham's and adds no independent analysis.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole source among standard historical law dictionaries to record cili. The entry is minimal: it flags the term as Law French, identifies it as a corruption of celui, cites Kelham, and moves on. This brevity is appropriate — Burrill was performing a lexicographical duty by recording the variant so researchers could identify it, not expanding on a term with substantive legal content.
Kelham's original glossary remains the deeper resource for Law French pronoun variants of this kind. Black's Law Dictionary does not record cili, and neither Tomlin's Law Dictionary nor Bouvier's Law Dictionary includes it. The absence across other historical dictionaries reinforces that cili was always understood as a scribal variant, not a term of art.
No meaningful divergence exists among historical sources on this point, because so few recorded it at all.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the Anglo-Norman legal tradition of England. It has no counterpart in Scottish, Irish, or continental legal systems, and no relevance to American legal usage at any period.