Definition
Commorancy is the act of dwelling in a place as an inhabitant, determined primarily by the fact of usually sleeping or lodging there. In English common law usage, commorancy described a form of settled, habitual residence — the kind established by regularly lying in a place overnight. In American law, the term shifted in application to denote something considerably lighter: a mere temporary residence, short of legal domicile or permanent habitation.
The term occupies a narrow band between domicile (a person's fixed legal home, with intent to remain) and mere presence. Commorancy implies some regularity of habitation — more than a fleeting visit — but falls short of the permanence required for domicile.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A house for a place of residence, usually a temporary one; also, the act of dwelling or residence in a place.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A dwelling or ordinary residence in a place; habitation. Commorancy consists in usually lying there. Also used to mean residence temporarily, or for a short time.
The common and legal definitions are unusually close in vocabulary but diverge in a consequential way: the common definitions blend both the English and American legal senses without flagging the tension between them. In legal usage, the English sense (habitual residence established by regularly lying in a place) and the American sense (temporary residence) point in different directions. A researcher relying on a general dictionary definition will miss that the same word carried materially different weight depending on jurisdiction and era.
Common Confusion
Commorancy is frequently run together with domicile and residence in historical sources, and the three terms are not interchangeable. Domicile requires both physical presence and intent to make a place one's permanent home. Residence typically implies a degree of settled habitation, though less permanently than domicile. Commorancy, in its English common law sense, was defined by the physical fact of habitually sleeping in a place — intent was less central. In American usage, commorancy was further reduced to mere temporary residence, making it the lightest of the three. The risk in historical research is reading an English authority's use of commorancy as equivalent to residence or domicile when the term was doing specific, narrower work.
Why It Matters in Research
Commorancy is a term that appears most reliably in older English treatises and early American cases dealing with domicile, poor law settlement, taxation, voter qualification, and jury eligibility — contexts where the precise location of a person's habitation was legally determinative. Researchers encountering the term in pre-twentieth-century sources should be alert to which sense is operative: the English common law sense (habitual lodging) or the American sense (temporary residence). The two usages are nearly opposite in their implications for residency-dependent legal rights and obligations.
The Blackstone citation (4 Bl. Comm. 273) that appears across all three source dictionaries anchors the English common law definition and is the reference point for any historical analysis. American cases citing commorancy — particularly from Massachusetts and Maine courts — used the term to distinguish temporary sojourners from legal residents for purposes of poor relief settlement and similar statutes.
The term has largely fallen out of modern legal drafting. When it appears in contemporary sources, it is almost always in a historical or comparative context. Researchers should not expect to find it in modern statutes or recent case law.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st), Burrill's, and Black's (2nd) — reproduce substantially the same core definition, each tracing to 4 Bl. Comm. 273 for the English sense and to Massachusetts authority (19 Pick. 247–248) for the American modification. The consistency across sources reflects that commorancy never generated significant doctrinal dispute in its own right; it was a descriptive term rather than a contested legal standard.
Burrill's entry is notable for an apparent typographical artifact: the Burrill text in the source material runs the commorancy entry into an adjacent entry for COMMUNE CONCILIUM REGNI, a different term entirely. This is a formatting anomaly in the original dictionary, not a substantive connection between the terms.
Black's 2nd edition adds Maine cases (Pullen v. Monk, 82 Me. 412; Gilman v. Inman, 85 Me. 105) alongside the Massachusetts authority, suggesting the term had some regional legal currency in New England poor-law and settlement litigation.
None of the historical dictionaries address how commorancy interacts with the modern concept of domicile as developed in private international law, which is a gap for researchers working on conflict-of-laws questions.
Jurisdictional Note
The English common law sense of commorancy — residence established by habitually lying in a place — does not map cleanly onto American domicile doctrine, which centers on intent. American courts that used the term generally treated it as describing temporary physical presence rather than any form of settled legal home. Researchers working across English and American sources should treat the term as jurisdiction-sensitive and not assume continuity of meaning.