Definition
The natural and ordinary meaning of words in a legal document, instrument, or writing, understood as a reasonable person would understand them without straining, stretching, or distorting the language beyond its plain and usual sense. Common intendment is a principle of construction: when interpreting statutes, contracts, deeds, pleadings, or other legal writings, courts give words their common meaning as apparent on the face of the document, not some forced, technical, or extraordinary meaning imported from outside the text.
The principle operates as a check on overreaching construction. A court applying common intendment will not torture language to produce an interpretation that the words, read naturally and in context, cannot reasonably bear.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Intendment" does not appear as a standard entry in modern general dictionaries and is not in current common use.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Intendment — "Intention; design; meaning; a design or purpose imputed by the law." Common intendment would therefore suggest the ordinary, shared meaning or purpose attributed to something.
In everyday English, "intend" and its derivatives suggest subjective purpose. In legal usage, common intendment is not primarily about what a party subjectively meant — it is an objective standard: what the words ordinarily mean to a reasonable reader of the relevant instrument. The shift from subjective intent to objective ordinary meaning is the critical gap.
Common Confusion
Common intendment is sometimes loosely equated with the intent of the parties or the legislative intent behind a statute. These are related but distinct concepts. Legislative intent asks what the drafters meant to accomplish; party intent asks what contracting parties subjectively understood. Common intendment asks what the words themselves mean in their natural and ordinary sense, as understood generally. Courts reach for common intendment first; legislative or party intent becomes relevant only when the text is ambiguous or the plain meaning leads to an absurd result. Researchers working with older materials should be careful: historical sources sometimes use "intendment" to mean imputed legal purpose, which overlaps with but is not identical to the plain-meaning construction principle.
Why It Matters in Research
Common intendment appears most frequently in older English and American authorities — treatises, equity decisions, and common law pleading cases from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. By the twentieth century, the concept was largely absorbed into the vocabulary of plain meaning construction, textualism, and the plain-meaning rule. Researchers who encounter "common intendment" in a historical source and search for modern equivalents should look to plain meaning doctrine, the ordinary meaning canon, and related principles of statutory and contract construction.
The term matters most in two research contexts. First, when reading pre-twentieth century cases or pleading manuals, especially those citing Coke on Littleton or early English chancery practice, common intendment explains why a court refused to read extraordinary meaning into plain words. Second, it appears in deed and conveyancing cases where the question is whether a grant, reservation, or covenant carries the meaning its words naturally convey.
A trap in historical sources: Burrill's entry cites Coke on Littleton at pages 78 and 303. Coke uses "intendment" in several distinct senses across that work — sometimes to mean the law's presumption about a fact, sometimes to mean the ordinary sense of words. Researchers should not assume that every use of "intendment" in historical materials refers to the plain-meaning construction principle. Context governs.
The term also appears in pleading contexts, where common intendment governed how a court would read an ambiguous allegation — charitably, in its natural and usual sense, rather than in a strained sense that would render it defective. This pleading application is now largely obsolete in American practice but remains relevant when researching historical common law pleading or construing older judgments.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's are in close agreement. Both frame common intendment as the natural and usual meaning of words, understood without straining them to extraordinary or foreign senses. Burrill adds a useful gloss: the understanding is arrived at "according to the subject-matter," which acknowledges that ordinary meaning is always contextual — the same words may carry different common meanings in different subject areas.
Burrill's citation to Coke on Littleton is the authoritative root. Coke's treatment places common intendment within the broader framework of legal presumption and construction, and the early dictionaries Termes de la Ley, Cowell, and Blount all reflect this common law pedigree.
What historical dictionaries do not address is the term's eventual displacement by modern canons of construction. Neither Black's nor Burrill's notes that common intendment, as a distinct phrase, receded from judicial use as American courts developed a more systematic vocabulary for textual interpretation. The concept survived; the label largely did not.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No single Law Mind Encyclopedia entry is a primary match. The closest relevant entries are:
contracts_97: Third-Party Beneficiaries — Intended vs. Incidental Beneficiaries (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia) — relevant where the common intendment of contractual language determines whether a party is an intended beneficiary.